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MAYNARD’S 

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NATURE 


RALPH WALDO EMERSON 


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NEW YORK: 

Maynard, Merrill, & Co., 

29,31, and 33 East Nineteenth Street. 


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MAYNARD’S 

ENGLISH CLASSIC SERIES, 

For Classes in English Literature, Reading, Grammar, etc. 

EDITED BY EMINENT AMERICAN AND ENGLISH SCHOLARS. 

Each Volume containe a Sketch of the Author’s Life, Prefatory and Explanatory Notes, etc., eto. 


1 Byron’s Prophecy of Dante. (Cantos 

I. and II.) 

2 Milton’s L’Allegro, and II Penseroso. 

3 Lord Bacon’s Essays, Civil and Moral. 

(Selected.) 

4 Byron’s Prisoner of Chillon. 

6 Moore’s Fire Worshippers. (Lalla 
Rookh. Selected.) 

6 Goldsmith’s Deserted Tillage. 

7 Scott’s Marmion. (Selections from 

Canto VI.) 

8 Scott’s Lay of the Last Minstrel. 

(Introduction and Canto I.) 

9 Burns’s Cotter’s Saturday Night, 

and other Poems. 

10 Crabbe’s The Village. 

11 Campbell’s Pleasures of Hope.(Abridg- 

ment of Part I.) 

12 Macaulay’s Essay on Banyan’s Pil¬ 

grim’s Progress. 

13 Macaulay’s Armada, and other Poems. 

14 Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice. 

(Selections from ActsI., III., and IV.) 

15 Goldsmith’s Traveler. 

16 Hogg’s Queen’s Wake. (Selections.) 

17 Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner. 

18 Addison’s Sir Boger de Coverley. 

19 Gray’s Elegy in a Country Churchyard. 

20 Scott’s Lady of the Lake. (Canto I.) 

21 Shakespeare’s As You Like It, etc. 

(Selections.) 

22 Shakespeare’s King John, and Bich¬ 

ard III. (Selections.) 

23 Shakespeare’s Henry IV., Henry V., 

Henry VI., and Bichard III. (Selec¬ 
tions.) 

24 Shakespeare’s Henry VIII., and Julius 

Csesar. (Selections.) 

25 Wordsworth’s Excursion. (Book I.) 

26 Pope’s Essay on Criticism. 

27 Spenser’s Faerie Queene. (Cantos I. 

and II.) 

28 Cowper’s Task. (Book I.) 

29 Milton’s Comas. 

30 Tennyson’s Enoch Arden, The Lotns 

Eaters, Ulysses, and Tithonus. 

31 Irving's Sketch Book. (Selections.) 

32 Dickens’s Christmas Carol. (Condsd.) 

83 Carlyle's Hero as Prophet. 

84 Macaulay’s Warren Hastings. (Con¬ 

densed.) 

36 Goldsmith's Vicar of Wakefield. 

(Condensed.) 

36 Tennyson’s The Two Voices, and A 
Dream of Fair Women. 

87 Memory Quotations. 

38 Cavalier Poets. i 

39 Dryden’s Alexander’s Feast, Mac- 

Fleeknoe, and St. Cecilia’s Day. 


40 Keats’s The Eve of St. Agnes. 

41 Irving’s Legend of Sleepy Hollow. 

42 Lamb’s Tales from Shakespeare. 

43 Le Ho>y’s How to Teach Beading. 

44 Webster’s Bunker Hill Orations. 

45 The Academy Orthoepist. A Manual 

of Pronunciation. 

46 Milton’s Lycidas, and Hymn on the 

Nativity. 

47 Bryant’s Thanntopsis, and other Poems 

48 Buskin’s Modern Painters. (Selections.) 

49 The Shakespeare Speaker. 

50 Thackeray’s Roundabout Papers. 

51 Webster’s Oration on Adams and Jef¬ 

ferson. 

52 Brown’s Hub and His Friends. 

53 Morris’s Life and Death of Jason. 

54 Burke’s Speech on American Taxation. 

55 Pope’s Knpe of the Lock. 

56 Tennyson’s Elaine. 

67 Tennyson’s In Memoriam. (Condsd.) 

58 Church’s Story of the JEneid. (Abgd.) 

59 Church’s Story of the Iliad. (Abgd.) 

60 Swift's Gulliver’s Voyage to Lilliput. 

61 Macaulay’s Essay on Lord Bacon. 

(Condensed.) 

62 The Alcestis of Euripides. English 

Version by Rev. R. Potter, M.A. 

63 The Antigone of Sophocles. English 

Version by Thos. Francklin, D.D. 

64 Elizabeth Barrett Browning. (Se¬ 

lected Poems ) 

65 Robert Browring. (Selected Poems.) 

66 Addison’s Spectator. (Selections.) 

67 Scenes from George Eliot's Adam Bede. 

68 MatthewArnold’sCultureandAnarchy. 

69 DeQuincey’s Joan of Arc. 

70 Carlyle’s Essay on Burns. 

71 Byron’s Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage. 

(Cantos I. and II.) 

72 Poe’s Raven, and other Poems. 

73-74 Macaulay’s Lord Clive. (Double 

Number.) 

75 Webster’s Reply to Hayne. 

76-77 Macaulay's Lays of Ancient Rome. 

(Double Number.) (Selections.) 

78 American Paf .’’otic Selections: Dec¬ 
laration of Iude^r^ence, Washing¬ 
ton's Farewell Addrei*., Lincoln’s 
Gettysburg Speech, etc. 

79-80 Scott’s Lady of the Lake. (Con¬ 
densed.) 

81-82 Scott’s Marmion. (Condensed.) 
88-84 Pope’s Essay on Man. 

85 Shelley’s Skylark, Adonais, and other 

Poems 

86 Dickens's Cricket on the Hearth. 

(Abridged.) 

87 Spencer’s Philosophy of Style. 







MAYNARD'S ENGLISH CLASSIC SERIES, No. 227 


NATURE 


BY 

RALPH WALDO EMERSON 

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WITH BIOGRAPHY\ CRITICAL OPINIONS, AND 
EXPLANATORY NOTES 

BY 

J. W. ABERNETHY, Ph. D. 

Principal of Berkeley Institute, Brooklyn, N. Y. 


NEW YORK 

MAYNARD, MERRILL, & CO. 


New Series, No. 115. May 1, 1901. Published Monthly. Subscription Price, $ 1 - 25 . 
Entered at Post Office, New York, as Second-class Matter. 






I I ME. Li onan i ur i 

CONGRESS, 

Two Copies Received 

APR. 23 1901 

Copyright entry 

7Mx« ■ /yv ?<>! 

CLASS ^XXc. N*. 

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COPY 3. 




EALPH WALDO EMERSON 


Copyright, 1901, by Maynard, Merrill, & Co, 


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Life of Emerson 



HOME OF EMERSON IN CONCORD 

Ralph Waldo Emerson was born in Boston, May 25, 1803. 
He was descended from a long line of New England ministers, 
men of refinement and education. As a schoolboy he was quiet 
and retiring, reading a great deal, but not paying much atten¬ 
tion to his lessons. He entered Harvard at the early age of 
fourteen, but never attained a high rank there, although he 
took a prize for an essay on Socrates, and was made class poet 
after several others had declined. Next to his reserve and the 
faultless propriety of his conduct, his contemporaries at college 
seemed most impressed by the great maturity of his mind. 
Emerson appears never to have been really a boy. He was 
always serene and thoughtful, impressing all who knew him 
with that spirituality which was his most distinguishing 
characteristic. 

After graduating from college he taught school for a time, 
and then entered the Harvard Divinity School under Dr. Chan- 
ning, the great Unitarian preacher. Although he was not 
strong enough to attend all the lectures of the divinity course,, 

3 




















4 


LIFE OF EMERSON 


the college authorities deemed the name Emerson sufficient 
passport to the ministry. He was accordingly “ approbated to 
preach ” by the Middlesex Association of Ministers on October 
10, 1826. As a preacher, Emerson was interesting, though 
not particularly original. His talent seems to have been in 
giving new meaning to the old truths of religion. One of his 
hearers has said : “In looking back on his preaching I find he 
has impressed truths to which I always assented in such a 
manner as to make them appear new, like a clearer revelation.” 
Although his sermons were always couched in scriptural lan¬ 
guage, they were touched with the light of that genius which 
avoids the conventional and commonplace. In his other pas¬ 
toral duties Emerson was not quite so successful. It is charac¬ 
teristic of his deep humanity and his dislike for all fuss and 
commonplace that he appeared to least advantage at a funeral. 
A connoisseur in such matters, an old sexton, once remarked 
that on such occasions “ he did not appear at ease at all. To 
tell the truth, in my opinion, that young man was not born to 
be a minister.” 

Emerson did not long remain a minister. In 1832 he preached 
a sermon in which he announced certain views in regard to the 
communion service which were disapproved by a large part 
of his congregation. He found it impossible to continue 
preaching, and, with the most friendly feelings on both sides, 
he parted from his congregation. 

A few months later (1833) he went to Europe for a short 
year of travel. While abroad, he visited Walter Savage 
Landor, Coleridge and Wordsworth, and Thomas Carlyle. 
This visit to Carlyle was to both men a most interesting ex¬ 
perience. They parted feeling that they had much intellectu¬ 
ally in common. This belief fostered a sympathy which, by 
the time they had discovered how different they really were, 
had grown so strong a habit that they always kept up their 
intimacy. This year of travel opened Emerson’s eyes to many 
things of which he had previously been ignorant; he had 
profited by detachment from the concerns of a limited com¬ 
munity and an isolated church. 

After his return he began to find his true field of activity in 


LIFE OF EMERSON 


5 


the lecture-hall, and delivered a number of addresses in Boston 
and its vicinity. While thus coming before the open public 
on the lecture platform, he was all the time preparing the 
treatise which was to embody all the quintessential elements 
of his philosophical doctrine. This was the essay Nature, 
which was published in 1836. By its conception of external 
Nature as an incarnation of the Divine Mind it struck the 
fundamental principle of Emerson’s religious belief. The 
essay had a very small circulation at first, though later it be¬ 
came widely known. 

In the winter of 1836 Emerson followed up his discourse on 
Nature by a course of twelve lectures on the “ Philosophy of 
History,” a considerable portion of which eventually became 
embodied in his essays. The next year (1837) was the year of 
the delivery of the Man Thinking, or the American Scholar 
address before the Phi Beta Kappa Society at Cambridge. 

This society, composed of the first twenty-five men in each 
class graduating from college, has annual meetings which have 
called forth the best efforts of many distinguished scholars and 
thinkers. Emerson’s address was listened to with the most 
profound interest. It declared a sort of intellectual independ¬ 
ence for America. Henceforth we were to be emancipated 
from clogging foreign influences, and a national literature was 
to expand under the fostering care of the Republic. 

These two discourses, Nature and The American Scholar, 
strike the keynote of Emerson’s philosophical, poetical, and 
moral teachings. In fact he had, as every great teacher has, 
only a limited number of principles and theories to teach. 
These principles of life can all be enumerated in twenty words 
—self-reliance, culture, intellectual and moral independence, 
the divinity of nature and man, the necessity of labor, and 
high ideals. 

Emerson spent the latter part of his life in lecturing and in 
literary work. His son, Dr. Edward Emerson, gave an interest¬ 
ing account of how these lectures were constructed. “All 
through his life he kept a journal. This book, he said, was 
his ‘ Savings Bank.’ The thoughts thus received and garnered 
in his journals were indexed, and a great many of them ap- 


6 


LIFE OF EMERSON 


peared in his published works. They were religiously set 
down just as they came, in no order except chronological, but 
later they were grouped, enlarged or pruned, illustrated, 
worked into a lecture or discourse, and, after having in this 
capacity undergone repeated testing and rearranging, were 
finally carefully sifted and more rigidly pruned, and were 
printed as essays.” 

Besides his essays and lectures Emerson left some poetry in 
which is embodied those thoughts which were to him too deep 
for prose expression. Oliver Wendell Holmes in speaking of 
this says: “Emerson wrote occasionally in verse from his 
school-days until he had reached the age which used to be 
known as the grand climacteric, sixty-three. . . . His poems are 
not and hardly can become popular ; they are not meant to be 
liked by the many, but to be dearly loved and cherished by 
the few. . . . His occasional lawlessness in technical construc¬ 
tion, his somewhat fantastic expressions, his enigmatic obscu¬ 
rities hardly detract from the pleasant surprise his verses so 
often bring with them. .. . The poetic license which we allow 
in the verse of Emerson is more than excused by the noble 
spirit which makes us forget its occasional blemishes, some¬ 
times to be pleased with them as characteristic of the writer.” 

Emerson was always a striking figure in the intellectual life 
of America. His discourses were above all things inspiring. 
Through them many were induced to strive for a higher self¬ 
culture. His influence can be discerned in all the literary 
movements of the time. He was the central figure of the so- 
called transcendental school which was so prominent fifty years 
ago, although he always rather held aloof from any enthusiastic 
participation in the movement. 

Emerson lived a quiet life in Concord, Massachusetts. “He 
was a first-rate neighbor and one who always kept his fences 
up.” He traveled extensively on his lecturing tours, even go¬ 
ing as far as England. In English Traits he has recorded his 
impressions of what he saw of English life and manners. 

Oliver Wendell Holmes has described him in this wise: 
“His personal appearance was that of the typical New Eng¬ 
lander of college-bred ancestry. Tall, spare, slender, with 


LIFE OF EMERSON 


7 


sloping slioulders, slightly stooping in his later years, with 
light hair and eyes, the scholar’s complexion, the prominent, 
somewhat arched nose which belongs to many of the IS ew Eng¬ 
land sub-species, thin lips, suggestive of delicacy, but having 
nothing like primness, still less of the rigidity which is often 
noticeable in the generation succeeding next to that of the men 
in their shirt-sleeves, he would have been noticed anywhere as 
one evidently a scholarly thinker astray from the alcove or the 
study, which were his natural habitats. His voice was very 
sweet, and penetrating without any loudness or mark of effort. 
His enunciation w r as beautifully clear, but he often hesitated 
as if waiting for the right word to present itself. His manner 
was very quiet, his smile was pleasant, but he did not like ex¬ 
plosive laughter any better than Hawdliorne did. None who 
met him can fail to recall that serene and kindly presence, in 
which there was mingled a certain spiritual remoteness with 
the most benignant human welcome to all who were privileged 
to enjoy his companionship.” 

Emerson died April 27, 1882, after a few days’ illness from 
pneumonia. Dr. Garnett in his excellent biography says: 
“ Seldom had ‘ the reaper whose name is Death ’ gathered such 
illustrious harvest as betw r een December 1880 and April 1882. 
In the first month of this period George Eliot passed away, in 
the ensuing February Carlyle followed ; in April Lord Beacons- 
field died, deplored by his party, nor unregretted by his coun¬ 
try ; in February of the following year Longfellow was carried 
to the tomb ; in April Rossetti was laid to rest by the sea, and 
the pavement of Westminster Abbey was disturbed to receive 
the dust of Darwin. And now Emerson lay down in death be¬ 
side the painter of man and the searcher of nature, the English- 
Oriental statesman, the poet of the plain man and the poet of 
the artist, and the prophet whose name is indissolubly linked 
with his own. All these men passed into Eternity laden with 
the spoils of Time, but of none of them could it be said, as of 
Emerson, that the most shining intellectual glory and the most 
potent intellectual force of a continent had departed along with 
him,” 


8 OPINIONS OF EMEESON AND HIS WRITINGS 


Critical Opinions of Emerson and his 

Writings 

Matthew Arnold, in an address on Emerson delivered in 
Boston, gave an excellent estimate of the rank we should 
accord to him in the great hierarchy of letters. Some, 
perhaps, will think that Arnold was unappreciative and 
cold, but dispassionate readers will be inclined to agree 
with his judgment of our great American. 

After a review of the poetical works of Emerson the Eng¬ 
lish critic draws his conclusions as follows : 

“ I do not then place Emerson among the great poets. But 
I go farther, and say that I do not place him among the great 
writers, the great men of letters. Who are the great men of 
letters ? They are men like Cicero, Plato, Bacon, Pascal, Swift, 
Voltaire—writers with, in the first place, a genius and instinct 
for style. . . . Brilliant and powerful passages in a man’s 
writings do not prove his possession of it. Emerson has 
passages of noble and pathetic eloquence ; he has passages of 
shrewd and felicitous wit ; he has crisp epigram; he has 
passages of exquisitely touched observation of nature. Yet he 
is not a great writer. . . . Carlyle formulates perfectly the 
defects of his friend’s poetic and literary productions when 
he says: ‘For me it is too ethereal, speculative, theoretic; I 
will have all things condense themselves, take shape and body, 
if they are to have my sympathy.’ . . . 

“. . . Not with the Miltons and Grays, not with the Platos 
and Spinozas, not with the Swifts and Voltaires, not with the 
Montaignes and Addisons, can we rank Emerson. No man 
could see this clearer than Emerson himself. ‘Alas, my 
friend,’ he writes in reply to Carlyle, who had exhorted him 
to creative work,—‘ Alas, my friend, I can do no such gay 
thing as you say. I do not belong to the poets, but only to a 
low department of literature,—the reporters ; suburban men.’ 
Be deprecated his friend’s praise ; praise ‘ generous to a fault ’ 


OPINIONS OF EMERSON AND HIS WRITINGS 9 


he calls it; praise ‘ generous to the shaming of me,—cold, fas¬ 
tidious, ebbing person that I am.’ ” 

After all this unfavorable criticism Arnold begins to 
praise. Quoting passages from the Essays, he adds : 

“ This is tonic indeed 1 And let no one object that it is too 
general; that more practical, positive direction is what we 
want. . . . Yes, truly, his insight is admirable ; his truth is 
precious. Yet the secret of his effect is not even in these ; it 
is in his temper. It is in the hopeful, serene, beautiful temper 
wherewith these, in Emerson, are indissolubly united ; in which 
they work and have their being. . . . One can scarcely overrate 
the importance of holding fast to happiness and hope. It gives 
to Emerson’s work an invaluable virtue. As Wordsworth’s 
poetry is, in my judgment, the most important done in verse, 
in our language, during the present century, so Emerson’s 
Essays are, I think, the most important work done in prose. 
. . . But by his conviction that in the life of the spirit is hap¬ 
piness, and by his hope that this life of the spirit will come 
more and more to be sanely understood, and to prevail, and to 
work for happiness,—by this conviction and hope Emerson 
was great, and he will surely prove in the end to have been 
right in them. . . . You cannot prize him too much, nor heed 
him too diligently.” 

Herman Grimm, a German critic of great influence in 
his own country, did much to obtain a hearing for Emer¬ 
son’s works in Germany. At first the Germans could not 
understand the unusual English, the unaccustomed turns 
of phrase which are so characteristic of Emerson’s style. 

“ Macaulay gives them no difficulty; even Carlyle is com¬ 
prehended. But in Emerson’s writings the broad t urnpike is 
suddenly changed into a hazardous sandy foot-path. His 
thoughts and his style are American. He is not writing for 
Berlin, but for the people of Massachusetts. ... It is an art 
to rise above what we have been taught. . . . All great men 
are seen to possess this freedom. They derive their standard 
from their own natures, and their observations on life are so 
natural and spontaneous that it would seem as if the most 


10 OPINIONS OF EMERSON AND HIS WRITINGS 


illiterate person with a scrap of common-sense would have 
made the same. ... We become wiser with them, and know 
not how the difficult appears easy and the involved plain. 

“Emerson possesses this noble manner of communicating 
himself. He inspires me with courage and confidence. He 
has read and seen but conceals the labor. I meet in his works 
plenty of familiar facts, but he does not employ them to figure 
up anew the old worn-out problems : each stands on a new 
spot and serves for new combinations. From everything he 
sees the direct line issuing which connects it with the focus of 
life. . . 

“. . . Emerson’s theory is that of the ‘ sovereignty of the 
individual.’ To discover what a young man is good for, and 
to equip him for the path he is to strike out in life, regardless 
of any other consideration, is the great duty to which he calls 
attention. He makes men self-reliant. He reveals to the eyes 
of the idealist the magnificent results of practical activity, and 
unfolds before the realist the grandeur of the ideal world of 
thought. No man is to allow himself, through prejudice, 
to make a mistake in choosing the task to which he will 
devote his life. Emerson’s essays are, as it were, printed 
sermons,—all having this same text. . . . The wealth and 
harmony of his language overpowered and entranced me 
anew. But even now 1 cannot say wherein the secret of his 
influence lies. What he has written is like life itself—the 
unbroken thread ever lengthened through the addition of the 
small events which make up each day’s experience.” 

Froude in his famous “Life of Carlyle ” gives an interest¬ 
ing description of Emerson’s visit to the Carlyles in Scot¬ 
land : 

“The Carlyles were sitting alone at dinner on a Sunday 
afternoon at the end of August when a Dumfries carriage 
drove to the door, and there stepped out of it a young 
American then unknown to fame, but whose influence in his 
own country equals that of Carlyle in ours, and whose name 
stands connected with his wherever the English language is 
spoken. Emerson, the younger of the two, had just broken 


OPINIONS OF EMERSON AND HIS WRITINGS 11 


his Unitarian fetters, and was looking out and around him 
like a young eagle longing for light. He had read Carlyle’s 
articles and had discerned with the instinct of genius that here 
was a voice speaking real and fiery convictions, and no longer 
echoes and conventionalisms. He had come to Europe to 
study its social and spiritual phenomena; and to the young 
Emerson as to the old Goethe, the most important of them 
appeared to be Carlyle. . . . The acquaintance then begun to 
their mutual pleasure ripened into a deep friendship, which 
has remained unclouded in spite of wide divergences of 
opinion throughout their working lives.” 

Carlyle wrote to his mother after Emerson had left: 

“Our third happiness was the arrival of a certain young 
unknown friend named Emerson, from Boston, in the United 
States, who turned aside so far from his British, French, and 
Italian travels to see me here ! He had an introduction from 
Mill and a Frenchman (Baron d’Eichthal’s nephew) whom 
John knew at Rome. Of course, we could do no other than 
welcome him ; the rather as he seemed to be one of the most 
lovable creatures in himself we had ever looked on. He 
stayed till next day with us, and talked and heard to his 
heart’s content, and left us all really sad to part with him.” 

In 1841 Carlyle wrote to John Sterling a few words apropos 
of the recent publication of Emerson’s essays in England : 

“I love Emerson’s book, not for its detached opinions, not 
even for the scheme of the general world he has framed for 
himself, or any eminence of talent he has expressed that with, 
but simply because it is his own book ; because there is a tone 
of veracity, an unmistakable air of its being his, and a real 
utterance of a human soul, not a mere echo of such. I con¬ 
sider it, in that sense, highly remarkable, rare, very rare, in 
these days of ours. Ach Gott l It is frightful to live among 
echoes. The few that read the book, I imagine, will get 
benefit of it. To America, I sometimes say that Emerson, 
such as he is, seems to me like a kind of New Era.” 

John Morley, the acute English critic, has made an 
analytic study of Emerson’s style, which may reconcile the 
reader to some of its exasperating peculiarities. 


12 OPINIONS OF EMERSON AND HIS WRITINGS 


“ One of the traits that every critic notes in Emerson’s writ¬ 
ing is that it is so abrupt, so sudden in its transitions, so dis¬ 
continuous, so inconsecutive. Dislike of a sentence that drags 
made him unconscious of the quality that French critics name 
coulant. Everything is thrown in just as it comes, and some¬ 
times the pell-mell is enough to persuade us that Pope did not 
exaggerate when he said that no one qualification is so likely 
to make a good writer as the power of rejecting his own 
thoughts. . . . Apart from his difficult staccato, Emerson is 
not free from secondary faults. He uses words that are not 
only odd, but vicious in construction ; he is sometimes oblique 
and he is often clumsy; and there is a visible feeling after 
epigrams that do not always come. When people say that 
Emerson’s style must be good and admirable because it fits his 
thought, they forget that though it is well that a robe should 
fit, there is still something to be said about its cut and 
fashion. „ „ . Yet, as happens to all fine minds, there came to 
Emerson ways of expression deeply marked with character. 
On every page there is set the strong stamp of sincerity, and 
the attraction of a certain artlessness; the most awkward 
sentence rings true ; and there is often a pure and simple note 
that touches us more than if it were the perfection of elabo¬ 
rated melody. 

CRITICAL OPINIONS OF “ NATURE ” 

** The publication of the little volume called ‘ Nature,’ ” says 
Whipple, “ lifted the heretic Unitarian parson into a leader of 
a new school of thought, and New England transcendental¬ 
ism dates its existence from that charming and suggestive 
book. At the time of its publication it was impossible to 
meet educated men and women in any social circle in Boston 
without hearing ‘ Nature ’ discussed; the elderly scholars assail¬ 
ing and the younger defending it.” “ It fell,” says Holmes, 
“ like an aerolite; unasked for, unaccounted for, unexpected, 
almost unwelcome,—a stumbling-block to be got out of the 
well-trodden highway of New England scholastic intelligence.” 

“ Nature” is essentially a prose poem, and its eight chap¬ 
ters, as Holmes suggests, “might almost as well have been 


BIBLIOGRAPHY 


13 


called cantos.” In its own day, the shock of its strange ideas 
was chiefly effective. “As we read it to-day,” says Chap¬ 
man, ‘ ‘ we are struck by its extraordinary beauty of language. 
It is a supersensuous, lyrical, and sincere rhapsody; written 
evidently by a man of genius. It reveals a nature compelling 
respect,—a Shelley, and yet a sort of Yankee Shelley, who 
is mad only when the wind is nor’-nor’-west; a mature nature 
which must have been nourished for years upon its own 
thoughts, to speak this new language so eloquently, to stand 
so calmly on its feet. The deliverance of his thought is so 
perfect that this work adapts itself to our mood and has the 
quality of poetry.” 

Richard Garnett says: “Of all Emerson’s writings this is 
the most individual, and the most adapted for a general intro¬ 
duction to his ideas. These ideas are not, in fact, peculiar to 
him; and yet the little book is one of the most original ever 
written, and one of those most likely to effect an intellectual 
revolution in the mind capable of apprehending it. The rea¬ 
son is mainly the intense vitality of the manner, and the trans¬ 
lation of abstract arguments into concrete shapes of witchery 
and beauty. It contains not a sentence that is not beautiful— 
not with the cold beauty of art, but with the radiance and 
warmth of feeling. Its dominant note is rapture, like the joy 
of one who has found an enchanted realm, or who has con¬ 
vinced himself that old stories deemed too beautiful to be true 
are true indeed. Yet it is exempt from extravagance; the 
splendor of language is chastened by taste, and the gladness 
and significance of the author’s announcements would justify 
even a more ardent enthusiasm.” 


BIBLIOGRAPHY 

James Elliot Cabot's “Memoir of Ralph Waldo Emerson”; 
Oliver Wendell Holmes's “ Emerson ” (American Men of Let¬ 
ters); Richard Garnett's “Emerson” (Great Writers Series); 
G. W. Cooke's “ Ralph Waldo Emerson, His Life, Writings, 
and Philosophy”; M. D. Conway's “Emerson at Home and 


14 


list of emerson’s works 


Abroad”; E. W. Emerson's “Emerson in Concord”; A. B. 
Alcott's “Concord Days” and “Genius and Character of 
Emerson”; A. II. Guernsey's “Ralph Waldo Emerson, 
Philosopher and Poet”; “ Carlyle-Emerson Correspondence”; 
E. P. Whipple's “ Recollections of Eminent Men” and “Amer¬ 
ican Literature”; Theodore Wolfe's “Literary Shrines”; 
Lowell's “ Emerson the Lecturer” (Prose Works, vol. i.) and 
“A Fable for Critics”; Matthew Arnold's “Discourses in 
America”; John Morley's “ Ralph Waldo Emerson, an Es¬ 
say”; Stedman’s “Poets of America”; George William 
Curtis's “Literary and Social Essays”; C. J. Woodbury's 
“ Talks with Emerson ”; Henry James's “ Partial Portraits”; 
Augustine Birrell's “ Obiter Dicta,” second series; Sanborn's 
“ Genius and Character of Emerson ”; Barrett Wendell's 
“ Literary History of America”; Hermann Grimm's “ Litera¬ 
ture”; Julian Hawthorne's “Confessions and Criticisms”; 
John Burroughs's “Indoor Studies”; 0. B. Frothingham's 

“Transcendentalism in New England”; T. W. Hunt's 

% 

“ Studies in Literature and Style”; Richardson's “ American 
Literature”; Nichol’s “American Literature”; “ Library of 
the World’s Best Literature ” ( Richard Garnett)-, H. E. Scud- 
der’s 1 ‘ Men and Letters ” ; J. M. Robertson's ‘ ‘ Modern 
Humanists ”; N. P. Willis’s “ Hurry graphs ”; “ Letters from 
Ralph Waldo Emerson to a Friend,” edited by C. E. Norton ; 
W. S. Walsh’s “Pen Pictures of Modern Authors”; W. D. 
Hoicells’s “ Literary Friends and Acquaintance”; R. Far- 
quharson Sharp’s “ Architects of English Literature.” 


CHRONOLOGICAL LIST OF EMERSON’S PRINCIPAL WORKS 


Nature,.1836 

Essays (First Series), . 1841 
Essays (Second Series), . 1844 

Poems,.1847 

Miscellanies.1849 

Representative Men, . 1850 


English Traits, . . . 1856 
Conduct of Life, . . 1860 
Society and Solitude, . 1870 
Correspondence of Tho¬ 
mas Carlyle and R. W. 
Emerson, .... 1883 








NATURE 


A subtle chain of counties* rings 
The next unto the farthest brings ; 
The eye reads omens where it goes, 
And speaks all languages the rose ; 
And, striving to be man, the worm 
Mounts through all the spires of form. 


AUTHOR’S INTRODUCTION 

Our age is retrospective. It builds the sepulchers 
of the fathers. It writes biographies, histories, and 
criticism. The foregoing generations 1 beheld God and 
nature face to face; we, through their eyes. Why 
should not we also enjoy an original relation to the 
universe? Why should not we have a poetry and phi¬ 
losophy of insight and not of tradition, and a reli¬ 
gion by revelation to us, and not the history of theirs? 
Embosomed for a season in nature, whose floods of life 
stream around and through us, and invite us by the 
powers they supply, to action proportioned to nature, 


1. The foregoing generations. The influence of Wordsworth upon 
Emerson is evident throughout this essay. Oliver Wendell 
Holmes points out the similarity between these opening lines and 
Wordsworth’s preface to “The Excursion” : 

“Paradise and groves 
Elysian, Fortunate Fields—like those of old 
Sought in the Atlantic Main—why should they be 
A history only of departed things, 

Or a mere fiction of what never was ? ” 




16 


NATURE 


why should we grope among the dry bones of the past, 
or put the living generation into masquerade out of 
its faded wardrobe? The sun shines to-day also. 
There is more wool and flax in the fields. There are 
new lands, new men, new thoughts. Let us demand 
our own works and laws and worship. 

Undoubtedly we have no questions to ask which are 
unanswerable. We must trust the perfection of the 
creation so far as to believe that whatever curiosity 
the order of things has awakened in our minds, the 
order of things can satisfy. Every man’s condition is 
a solution in hieroglyphic to those inquiries he would 
put. He acts it as life, before he apprehends it as 
truth. In like manner, nature is already, in its forms 
and tendencies, describing its own design. Let us 
interrogate the great apparition that shines so peace¬ 
fully around us. Let us inquire, to what end is 
nature ? 

All science has one aim, namely, to find a theory of 
nature. We have theories of races and of functions, 
but scarcely yet a remote approach to an idea of cre¬ 
ation. We are now so far from the road to truth, that 
religious teachers dispute and hate each other, and 
speculative men are esteemed unsound and frivolous. 
But to a sound judgment, the most abstract truth is 
the most practical. Whenever a true theory appears, 
it will be its own evidence. Its test is, that it will 
explain all phenomena. Now many are thought not 
only unexplained but inexplicable; as language, sleep, 
madness, dreams, beasts, sex. 

Philosophically considered, the universe is composed 
of Nature and the Soul. Strictly speaking, therefore, 
all that is separate from us, all which philosophy dis- 


NATURE 


17 


tinguish.es as the Not Me, that is, both nature and art, 
all other men and my own body, must be ranked under 
this name. Nature. In enumerating the values of 
nature and casting up their sum, I shall use the word 
in both senses;—in its common and in its philosoph¬ 
ical import. In inquiries so general as our present 
one, the inaccuracy is not material; no confusion of 
thought will occur. Nature, in the common sense, 
refers to essences unchanged by man; space, the air, 
the river, the leaf. Art is applied to the mixture of 
his will with the same things, as in a house, a canal, 
a statue, a picture. But his operations taken to¬ 
gether are so insignificant, a little chipping, baking, 
patching, and washing, that in an impression so grand 
as that of the world on the human mind, they do not 
vary the result. 


CHAPTER I 

To go into solitude, a man needs to retire as much 
from his chamber as from society. I am not solitary 
whilst I read and write, though nobody is with me. 
But if a man would be alone, let him look at the stars. 
The rays that come from those heavenly worlds will 
separate between him and what he touches. One 
might think the atmosphere was made transparent 
with this design, to give man, in the heavenly bodies, 
the perpetual presence of the sublime. Seen in the 
streets of cities, how great they are! If the stars 
should appear one night in a thousand years, how 
would men believe and adore; and preserve for many 
generations the remembrance of the city of God which 


18 


NATURE 


had been shown! But every night come out these 
envoys of beauty, and light the universe with their 
admonishing smile. 

The stars awaken a certain reverence, because 
though always present, they are inaccessible; but all 
natural objects make a kindred impression, when the 
mind is open to their influence. Nature never wears 
a mean appearance. Neither does the wisest man ex¬ 
tort her secret, and lose his curiosity by finding out 
all her perfection. Nature never became a toy to a 
wise spirit. The flowers, the animals, the mountains, 
reflected the wisdom of his best hour, as much as they 
had delighted the simplicity of his childhood. 

When we speak of nature in this manner, we have 
a distinct but most poetical sense in the mind. We 
mean the integrity of impression made by manifold 
natural objects. It is this which distinguishes the 
stick of timber of the wood-cutter, from the tree of 
the poet. The charming landscape which I saw this 
morning is undubitably made up of some twenty or 
thirty farms. Miller owns this field, Locke that, and 
Manning the woodland beyond. But none of them 
owns the landscape. There is a property in the hori¬ 
zon which no man has but he whose eye can integrate 
all the parts, 1 that is, the poet. This is the best part 
of these men’s farms, yet to this their warranty-deeds 
give no title. 

To speak truly, few adult persons can see nature. 

1. Integrate all the parts. The poet has a proprietorship in the 
fields in a way superior to that of farmer Miller and farmer Locke, 
because he can unite, integrate all the farms in a single, total 
impression of landscape beauty ; just as the artist selects and 
combines the effects of many fields, making an artistic whole upon 
his canvas, which he carries away as his own. 



NATURE 


19 


Most persons do not see the sun. 1 At least they have 
a very superficial seeing. The sun illuminates only the 
eye of the man, but shines into the eye and the heart 
of the child. 2 The lover of nature is he whose inward 
and outward senses are still truly adjusted to each 
other; who has retained the spirit of infancy even into 
the era of manhood. His intercourse with heaven and 
earth becomes part of his daily food. In the presence 
of nature a wild delight runs through the man, in 
spite of real sorrows. Nature says,—he is my creature, 
and maugre 3 all his impertinent griefs, he shall be glad 
with me. Not the sun or the summer alone, but every 
hour and season yields its tribute of delight; for every 
hour and change corresponds to and authorizes a dif¬ 
ferent state of the mind, from breathless noon to grim¬ 
mest midnight. Nature is a setting that fits equally 
well a comic or a mourning piece. In good health, 
the air is a cordial of incredible virtue. Crossing a 
bare common, in snow puddles, at twilight, under a 
clouded sky, without having in my thoughts any oc¬ 
currence of special good fortune, I have enjoyed a per¬ 
fect exhilaration. I am glad to the brink of fear. In 
the woods, too, a man casts off his years, as the snake 
his slough, and at what period soever of life, is always 
a child. In the woods is perpetual youth. Within 

1. Most persons do not see the sun. So, too, Ruskin says : “It 
is a strange thing how little in general people know about the sky.” 

2. The sun illuminates, etc. This idea of the broader and more 
intimate relationship of childhood to nature is the fundamental 
idea of Wordsworth’s “Intimations of Immortality.” 

“ Shades of the prison-house begin to close 
Upon the growing boy.” 

3. Maugre. Is the use of this word good English usage, or does 
the word have to be translated? 



20 


NATURE 


these plantations of God, a decorum and sanctity reign, 
a perennial festival is dressed, and the guest sees not 
how he should tire of them in a thousand years. In 
the woods, we return to reason and faith. There I feel 
that nothing can befall me in life,—no disgrace, no 
calamity (leaving me my eyes), which nature cannot 
repair. Standing on the bare ground,—my head 
bathed by the blithe air, and uplifted into infinite 
space,—all mean egotism vanishes. I become a trans¬ 
parent eye-ball; 1 I am nothing; I see all; the currents 
of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am 
part or particle of God. The name of the nearest 
friend sounds then foreign and accidental: to be 
brothers, to be acquaintances,—master or servant, is 
then a trifle and a disturbance. I am the lover of un¬ 
contained and immortal beauty. In the wilderness, 
I find something more dear and connate 2 than in 
streets or villages. In the tranquil landscape, and es¬ 
pecially in the distant line of the horizon, man be¬ 
holds somewhat as beautiful as his own nature. 

The greatest delight which the fields and woods min¬ 
ister is the suggestion of an occult relation between 


1. Transparent eye-ball. Emerson is describing, by one of his 
bold transcendental metaphors, an exalted state of feeling in 
which common material relations seem to vanish, and all the senses 
except sight cease their activity. Such moments of exaltation in the 
presence of nature bring a sense of kinship with God. “ Man, when 
he thinks, is placed at the center of beings, where a ray of relation 
passes from every other being to him ; every natural fact is seen as 
the symbol of a spiritual fact, the expression of a thought that does 
not stop there, but goes on endlessly to embody itself in higher 
and higher forms.”— Cabot’s “ Memoir of Erne)'son.' 1 

2. Connate. Latin connatus, born with. The living things of 
the wilderness seem more closely related to him, as by birth, than 
the people of streets and villages. 




NATURE 


21 


man and the vegetable. I am not alone and unac¬ 
knowledged. They nod to me, and I to them. The 
waving of the boughs in the storm is new to me and 
old. It takes me by surprise, and yet is not unknown. 
Its effect is like that of a higher thought or a better 
emotion coming over me, when I deemed I was think¬ 
ing justly or doing right. 

Yet it is certain that the power to produce this de¬ 
light does not reside in nature, but in man, or in a 
harmony of both. 1 It is necessary to use these pleas¬ 
ures with great temperance. For nature is not always 
tricked in holiday attire, but the same scene which 
yesterday breathed perfume and glittered as for the 
frolic of the nymphs, is overspread with melancholy 
to-day. Nature always wears the colors of the spirit. 
To a man laboring under calamity, the heat of his 
own fire hath sadness in it. 2 Then there is a kind of 
contempt of the landscape felt by him who has just 
lost by death a dear friend. The sky is less grand as 
it shuts down over less worth in the population. 

1. Yet it is certain, etc. Emerson says elsewhere, in substance, 
that we get from nature what we carry to nature. In chap. iii. 
of this essay he says : “ In proportion to the energy of his thought 
and will, he takes up the world into himself.” 

2. To a man laboring, etc. There is possibly an allusion here 
to the death of his brother Charles, which occurred while this 
essay was in preparation. 



22 


NATURE 


CHAPTEK II 

COMMODITY 1 

Whoever considers the final cause 2 of the world will 
discern a multitude of uses that enter as parts into 
that result. They all admit of being thrown into one 
of the following classes: Commodity; Beauty; Lan¬ 
guage; and Discipline. 

Under the general name of Commodity, I rank all 
those advantages which our senses owe to nature. 
This, of course, is a benefit which is temporary and 
mediate, not ultimate, like its service to the soul. Yet 
although low, it is perfect in its kind, and is the only 
use of nature which all men apprehend. The misery 
of man appears like childish petulance, when we ex¬ 
plore the steady and prodigal provision that has been 
made for his support and delight on this green ball 
which floats him through the heavens. What angels 
invented these splendid ornaments, these rich con¬ 
veniences, this ocean of air above, 3 this ocean of water 
beneath, this firmament 4 of earth beneath? this zodiac 
of lights, this tent of dropping clouds, this striped coat 

1. Commodity. Latin, commodus , convenient, helpful. Any¬ 
thing that is useful, convenient, or serviceable. Such things 
become commodities , in the commercial sense of the word. 

2. Final cause. The purpose or end for which an effect exists. 

A philosophical term, denoting one of the four forms of cause 
recognized by Aristotle : material, formal, efficient, and final. 

3. This ocean of air, etc. Compare “ Hamlet,” Act. II. sc. 2 : 
“This most excellent canopy, the air, look you, this brave o’erhang- 
ing firmament, this majestical roof fretted with golden fire.” 

4. Firmament. Used here in the primary sense of foundation, • 
support, something solid. Latin firmamentum, Jirmare, to make 
strong. 



COMMODITY 


23 


of climates, this fourfold year ? Beasts, fire, water, 
stones, and corn serve him. The field is at once his 
floor, his work-yard, his play-ground, his garden, and 
his bed. 

More servants wait on man 
Than he’ll take notice of. 1 

Nature, in its ministry to man, is not only the ma¬ 
terial, but is also the process and the result. All the 
parts incessantly w T ork into each other’s hands for the 
profit of man. The wind sows the seed ; 2 the sun 
evaporates the sea; the wind blows the vapor to the 
field; the ice, on the other side of the planet, con¬ 
denses rain on this; the rain feeds the plant; the plant 
feeds the animal; and thus the endless circulations of 
the divine charity nourish man. 

The useful arts are reproductions or new combina¬ 
tions by the wit of man, of the same natural bene¬ 
factors. He no longer waits for favoring gales, but 
by means of steam, he realizes the fable of iEolus’s 
bag , 3 and carries the two and thirty winds in the boiler 
of his boat. To diminish friction, he paves the road 
with iron bars, and, mounting a coach with a ship-load 
of men, animals, and merchandise behind him, he darts 

1. “More servants,” etc. From George Herbert. See chap, 
viii. of this essay. 

2. The wind sows the seed. Recall some of the marvelous 
contrivances by which the wind is enabled to scatter the seeds, as 
those of the maple, elm, thistle, and milk-weed. 

3. /Bolus's bag. iEolus, ruler of the winds, gave to Ulysses all 
the winds, except the favorable Zephyrus, tied up securely in an 
ox-hide bag. When in sight of home, Ulysses, tired with nine 
days’ watching, fell asleep, and his companions, believing that he 
had received treasure from .dSolus, opened the bag and let out the 
hostile winds, and the fleet was driven back to the iEolian islands. 
Homer’s “Odyssey,” Bk. X. 



24 


NATURE 


through the country, from town to town, like an eagle 
or a swallow through the air. By the aggregate of 
these aids, how is the face of the world changed, from 
the era of Noah to that of Napoleon! The private 
poor man hath cities, ships, canals, bridges, built for 
him. He goes to the post-office, and the human race 
run on his errands; to the book-shop, and the human 
race read and write of all that happens, for him; to 
the court-house, and nations repair his wrongs . 1 2 He 
sets his house upon the road, and the human race go 
forth every morning, and shovel out the snow, and 
cut a path for him. 

But there is no need of specifying particulars in this 
class of uses. The catalogue is endless, and the 
examples so obvious, that I shall leave them to the 
reader’s reflection, with the general remark, that this 
mercenary benefit is one which has respect to a farther 
good. A man is fed, not that he may be fed, but that 
he may work. 


CHAPTER III 

BEAUTY 

A nobler want of man is served by nature, namely, 
the love of Beauty. 

The ancient Greeks called the world hoGjaoG* 

1. He goes to the post-office, etc. The individual man is served 
by all the world; he shares the benefits of the active pursuits of 
all other men. We more often hear the opposite view expressed, 
that the individual serves the world, to his own loss. 

2. Koafios, The Greek meaning is primarily order, harmony; 
hence the orderly system of the universe is so called, in distinction 
from xao?, confusion, formlessness. The “music of the spheres” 
was one form of expressing the sense of this beauty and harmony 
in the interrelated bodies of the universe. 



BEAUTY 


25 


beauty. Such is the constitution of all things, or such 
the plastic power 1 of the human eye, that the primary 
forms, as the sky, the mountain, the tree, the animal, 
give us a delight in and for themselves; a pleasure 
arising from outline, color, motion, and grouping. 
This seems partly owing to the eye itself. The eye is 
the best of artists. By the mutual action of its 
structure and of the laws of light, perspective is pro¬ 
duced, which integrates every mass of objects, of what 
character soever, into a well colored and shaded globe, 
so that where the particular objects are mean and un¬ 
affecting, the landscape which they compose is round 
and symmetrical. And as the eye is the best com¬ 
poser, so light is the first of painters. There is no 
object so foul that intense light will not make it beauti¬ 
ful. 2 And the stimulus it affords to the sense, and a 
sort of infinitude which it hath, like space and time, 
make all matter gay. Even the corpse has its own 
beauty. But besides this general grace diffused over 
nature, almost all the individual forms are agreeable 
to the eye, as is proved by our endless imitations of 
some of them, as the acorn, the grape, the pine-cone, 
the wheat-ear, the egg, the wings and forms of most 
birds, the lion’s claw, the serpent, the butterfly, sea- 
shells, flames, clouds, buds, leaves, and the forms of 
many trees, as the palm. 

For better consideration, we may distribute the as¬ 
pects of beauty in a threefold manner. 

1. First, the simple perception of natural forms is 


1. Plastic power. The power to mold into definite forms or 
shapes, like the sculptor. 

2. There is no object, etc. Examine the grammatical structure 
of this sentence. 




26 


NATURE 


a delight. The influence of the forms and actions in 
nature is so needful to man, that, in its lowest func¬ 
tions, it seems to lie on the confines of commodity and 
beauty. To the body and mind which have been 
cramped by noxious work or company, nature is me¬ 
dicinal and restores their tone. The tradesman, the 
attorney comes out of the din and craft of the street 
and sees the sky and the woods, and is a man again. 
In their eternal calm, he finds himself. The health of 
the eye seems to demand a horizon. We are never 
tired, so long as we can see far enough. 

But in other hours, nature satisfies by its loveliness, 
and without any mixture of corporeal benefit. I see 
the spectacle of morning from the hill-top over against 
my house, from day-break to sun-rise, with emotions 
which an angel might share. The long slender bars of 
cloud float like fishes in the sea of crimson light. 
From the earth, as a shore, I look out into that silent 
sea. I seem to partake its rapid transformations; the 
active enchantment reaches my dust, 1 and I dilate and 
conspire with the morning wind. How does nature 
deify us with a few and cheap elements! Give me 
health and a day, and I will make the pomp of em¬ 
perors ridiculous. The dawn is my Assyria; 2 the sunset 
and moon-rise my Paphos, 3 and unimaginable realms of 

1. My dust. The enchantment sweeps over me and takes me 
up, like the wind. Conspire is here used in its Latin sense, 
con-spirare, to breathe with. 

2. Assyria. The representative of the oldest Eastern civiliza¬ 
tion. Emerson is suggesting the sweep of civilization westward. 
Notice his intention of briefly characterizing and contrasting the 
national tendencies of thought in England and Germany. 

3. Paphos. An ancient city of Cyprus, where was a celebrated 
temple of Aphrodite, whose priests celebrated her mysterious rites, 
and exercised a kind of religious authority over the island. 



BEAUTY 


27 


faerie; 1 broad noon shall be my England of the senses 
and the understanding; the night shall be my Ger¬ 
many of mystic philosophy and dreams. 

Not less excellent, except for our less susceptibility 
in the afternoon, was the charm, last evening, of a 
January sunset. The western clouds divided and sub¬ 
divided themselves into pink flakes modulated with 
tints of unspeakable softness, and the air had so much 
life and sweetness that it was a pain to come within 
doors. What was it that nature would say ? Was there 
no meaning in the live repose of the valley behind the 
mill, and which Homer or Shakspere could not re-form 
for me in words ? The leafless trees become spires of 
flame in the sunset, with the blue east for their back¬ 
ground, and the stars of the dead calices of flowers, 
and every withered stem and stubble rimed with frost, 
contribute something to the mute music. 

The inhabitants of cities suppose that the country 
landscape is pleasant only half the year. I please my¬ 
self with the graces of the winter scenery, and believe 
that we are as much touched by it as by the genial 
influences of summer. To the attentive eye, each mo¬ 
ment of the year has its own beauty, and in the same 
field, it beholds, every hour, a picture which was never 
seen before, and which shall never be seen again. The 
heavens change every moment, and reflect their glory 
or gloom on the plains beneath. The state of the 
crop in the surrounding farms alters the expression of 
the earth from week to week. The succession of native 
plants in the pastures and roadsides, which makes the 
silent clock by which time tells the summer hours, will 


1. Faerie. An archaic form of fairy, familiar in Spenser’s 
“ Faerie Queen,” meaning enchantment or magic. 




28 


NATURE 


make even the divisions of the day sensible to a keen 
observer. The tribes of birds and insects, like the 
plants punctual to their time, follow each other, and 
the year has room for all. By watercourses, the variety 
is greater. In July, the blue pontederia or pickerel- 
weed blooms in large beds in the shallow parts of our 
pleasant river, * 1 and swarms with yellow butterflies in 
continual motion. Art cannot rival this pomp of pur¬ 
ple and gold. Indeed the river is a perpetual gala, 
and boasts each month a new ornament. 

But this beauty of nature which is seen and felt 
as beauty, is the least part. The shows of day, the 
dewy morning, the rainbow, mountains, orchards in 
blossom, stars, moonlight, shadows in still water, and 
the like, if too eagerly hunted, become shows merely, 
and mock us with their unreality. Go out of the house 
to see the moon, and’t is mere tinsel; it will not please 
as when its light shines upon your necessary journey. 
The beauty that shimmers in the yellow afternoons of 
October, who ever could clutch it? Go forth to find it, 
and it is gone; ’t is only a mirage as you look from 
the windows of diligence. 

2. The presence of a higher, namely, of the spiritual 


1. Our pleasant river. The Musketaquid, flowing through Con¬ 
cord. “When I bought my farm,” wrote Emerson, “I did not 
know what a bargain I had in the bluebirds, bobolinks, and 
thrushes, which were not charged in the bill. As little did I guess 
what sublime mornings and sunsets I was buying, what reaches of 
landscape, and what fields and lanes for a tramp. Neither did 

I fully consider what an indescribable luxury is our Indian river, 
which runs parallel with the village street, and to which every 
house on that long street has a back door which leads down 
through the garden to the river bank, where a skiff or a dory 
gives you, all summer, access to enchantments new every day, and, 
all winter, two miles of ice for the skater.” 



BEAUTY 


29 


element is essential to its perfection. The high and 
divine beauty which can be loved without effeminacy, 
is that which is found in combination with the human 
will. Beauty is the mark God sets upon virtue. Every 
natural action is graceful. Every heroic act is also 
decent, 1 and causes the place and the bystanders to 
shine. We are taught by great actions that the uni¬ 
verse is the property of every individual in it. Every 
rational creature has all nature for his dowry and 
estate. It is his, if he will. He may divest himself of 
it; he may creep into a corner, and abdicate his king¬ 
dom, as most men do, but he is entitled to the world 
by his constitution. In proportion to the energy of his 
thought and will, he takes up the world into himself. 
“ All those things for which men plow, build, or sail, 
obey virtue; ” said Sallust. 2 “ The winds and waves,” 
said Gibbon, 3 “ are always on the side of the ablest 
navigators.” So are the sun and moon and all the stars 
of heaven. When a noble act is done,—perchance in 
a scene of great natural beauty; when Leonidas 4 and 
his three hundred martyrs consume one day in dying, 


1. Decent. Latin, decens, becoming, decorous ; as in Milton’s 
“II Penseroso 

“And sable stole of Cyprus lawn 
Over thy decent shoulders drawn.” 

2. Sallust. A Roman historian (b. c. 86-34), whose “ Catilina,” 
a history of the conspiracy of Catiline in the consulship of Cicero, 
is often read in schools. 

3. Gibbon. Edward Gibbon (1737-1794), the English historian, 
whose “History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire” is 
one of the grandest pieces of historical writing in any language. 

4. Leonidas. A Spartan king who, in 480 b. c., with three hun¬ 
dred Spartans and seven hundred Thespians, defended against the 
Persian army of Xerxes the pass of Thermopylae, through which 
passed the only road from northern into southern Greece. 



30 


NATURE 


and the sun and moon come each and look at them once 
in the steep defile of Thermopylae; when Arnold 
Winkelried, 1 in the high Alps, under the shadow of the 
avalanche, gathers in his side a sheaf of Austrian 
spears to break the line for his comrades; are not these 
heroes entitled to add the beauty of the scene to the 
beauty of the deed ? When the bark of Columbus nears 
the shore of America;—before it, the beach lined with 
savages, fleeing out of all their huts of cane; the sea 
behind; and the purple mountains of the Indian 
Archipelago around, can we separate the man from the 
living picture? Does not the New World clothe his 
form with her palm-groves and savannahs as fit 
drapery? Ever does natural beauty steal in like air, 
and envelop great actions. When Sir Harry Vane 2 
was dragged up the Tower-hill, sitting on a sled, to 
suffer death as the champion of the English laws, one 
of the multitude cried out to him, “ You never sate 
on so glorious a seat! ” Charles II., to intimidate the 
citizens of London, caused the patriot Lord Russell 3 
to be drawn in an open coach through the principal 
streets of the city on his way to the scaffold. “ But,” 
his biographer says, “ the multitude imagined they 

1. Arnold Winkelried. A Swiss patriot who is said to have 
decided the victory at Sempach, in 1386, by grasping a number of 
Austrian spears and plunging them into his own breast, thus 
opening a way through the enemy’s line over his dead body. 
Probably, however, the story is only a legend. 

2. Sir Harry Vane. A distinguished English statesman, for one 
year governor of Massachusetts Bay Colony ; he took an active 
part in the stormy affairs of Cromwell’s government, and was 
executed by Charles II. 

3. Lord Russell. Another of the victims of Charles II., con¬ 
demned in 1683 on a charge of high treason for supposed complicity 
in the Rye House Plot, a plot organized to kill the king. 



BEAUTY 


31 


saw liberty and virtue sitting by his side.” In private 
places, among sordid objects, an act of truth or hero¬ 
ism seems at once to draw to itself the sky as its 
temple, the sun as its candle. Nature stretches out 
her arms to embrace man, only let his thoughts be of 
equal greatness. Willingly does she follow his steps 
with the rose and the violet, and bend her lines of 
grandeur and grace to the decoration of her darling 
child. Only let his thoughts be of equal scope, and 
the frame will suit the picture. A virtuous man is in 
unison with her works, and makes the central figure 
of the visible sphere. Homer, Pindar, Socrates, 
Phocion, 1 associate themselves fitly in our memory with 
the geography and climate of Greece. The visible 
heavens and earth sympathize with Jesus. And in 
common life whosoever has seen a person of powerful 
character and happy genius, will have remarked how 
easily he took all things along with him,—the persons, 
the opinions, and the day, and nature became ancil¬ 
lary 2 to a man. 

3. There is still another aspect under which the 
beauty of the world may be viewed, namely, as it 
becomes an object of the intellect. Beside the rela¬ 
tion of things to virtue, they have a relation to 
thought. The intellect searches out the absolute order 
of things as they stand in the mind of God, and with¬ 
out the colors of affection. The intellectual and the 
active powers seem to succeed each other, and the ex- 

1. Homer, Pindar, Socrates, Phocion. The greatest Greek epic 
poet, the greatest lyric poet, one of the greatest philosophers, and 
one of the greatest statesmen and generals. The four names 
represent the intellectual glory of Greece. 

2. Ancillary. Latin, ancilla, maid-servant; hence subservient, 
auxiliary, giving aid, 



32 


NATURE 


elusive activity of the one generates the exclusive 
activity of the other. There is something unfriendly 
in each to the other, but they are like the alternate 
periods of feeding and working in animals; each pre¬ 
pares and will be followed by the other. Therefore does 
beauty, which, in relation to actions, as we have seen, 
comes unsought, and comes because it is unsought, 
remain for the apprehension and pursuit of the intel- * 
lect; and then again, in its turn, of the active power. 
Nothing divine dies. All good is eternally repro¬ 
ductive. The beauty of nature re-forms itself in the 
mind, and not for barren contemplation, but for new 
creation. 

All men are in some degree impressed by the face of 
the world; some men even to delight. This love of 
beauty is Taste. Others have the same love in such 
excess, that, not content with admiring, they seek to 
embody it in new forms. The creation of beauty is 
Art. 

The production of a work of art throws a light upon 
the mystery of humanity. A work of art is an abstract 
or epitome of the world. It is the result or expression 
of nature, in miniature. For although the works of 
nature are innumerable and all different, the result 
or the expression of them all is similar and single. 
Nature is a sea of forms radically alike and even 
unique. A leaf, a sunbeam, a landscape, the ocean, 
make an analogous impression on the mind. What is 
common to them all,—that perfectness and harmony, is 
beauty. The standard of beauty is the entire circuit of 
natural forms,—the totality of nature; which the Ital¬ 
ians expressed by defining beauty “ il piu nell’ uno.” 1 


1. “ II piu nell’ uno.” The many in the one. 



BEAUTY 


33 


Nothing is quite beautiful alone; 1 nothing but is 
beautiful in the whole. A single object is only so 
far beautiful as it suggests this universal grace. The 
poet, the painter, the sculptor, the musician, the archi¬ 
tect, seek each to concentrate this radiance of the 
world on one point, and each in his several work to 
satisfy the love of beauty which stimulates him to 
produce. Thus is Art a nature passed through the 
alembic of man. Thus in art does Nature work 
through the will of a man filled with the beauty of her 
first works. 

The world thus exists to the soul to satisfy the de¬ 
sire of beauty. This element I call an ultimate end. 
No reason can be asked or given why the soul seeks 
beauty. Beauty, in its largest and profoundest sense, 
is one expression for the universe. God is the all-fair. 
Truth, and goodness, and beauty, are but different 
faces of the same All. But beauty in nature is not 
ultimate. 2 It is the herald of inward and eternal 
beauty, and is not alone a solid and satisfactory good. 
It must stand as a part, and not as yet the last or 
highest expression of the final cause of nature. 

1. Nothing is quite beautiful alone. The poem “Each and All” 
should be read with this chapter on Beauty. There Emerson says : 

“ All are needed by each one ; 

Nothing is fair or good alone.” 

2. Beauty in nature is not ultimate. In the charming poem, 
“The Rhodora,” Emerson says : 

“ Beauty is its own excuse for being.” 

But here, in a more theoretical mood, he makes the beauty of the 
rose the symbol of something higher and more spiritual. 



34 


NATURE 


CHAPTER IV 

LANGUAGE 

Language is a third use which Nature subserves 
to man. Nature is the vehicle of thought, and in a 
single, double, and three-fold degree. 

1. Words are signs of natural facts. 

2. Particular natural facts are symbols of particular 
spiritual facts. 

3. Nature is the symbol of spirit. 

1. Words are signs of natural facts. The use of 
natural history is to give us aid in supernatural his¬ 
tory; the use of the outer creation, to give us language 
for the beings and changes of the inward creation. 
Every word which is used to express a moral or intel¬ 
lectual fact, if traced to its root, is found to be bor¬ 
rowed from some material appearance. Right 1 means 
straight; wrong 2 means twisted. Spirit 3 primarily 
means wind; transgression, 4 the crossing of a line; 
supercilious, 5 the raising of the eyebrow. We say the 
heart to express emotion, 6 the head to denote thought; 7 


1. Right. Latin, rectus , straight, just, right ( regere , to rule); 
old English, recht. 

2. Wrong. From the Anglo-Saxon verb wring; hence wrong 
is that which is wrung or twisted. 

3. Spirit. Latin, spiritus , breathing or blowing, as of the wind ; 
hence the breath of life, then the soul. 

4. Transgression. Latin trans-gredi (part, transgressus), to step 
across, step over. 

5. Supercilious. Latin supercilium, eyebrow, from super, above, 
and cilium, eyelid. 

6. Emotion. Emotion is from the Latin e-movere, to move away, 
stir up, agitate. 

7. Thought. Anglo-Saxon tkencan (pret. thohte), to exercise the 
mind, to judge. 



LANGUAGE 


35 


and thought and emotion are words borrowed from 
sensible things, and now appropriated to spiritual na¬ 
ture. Most of the process by which this transformation 
is made, is hidden from us in the remote time when 
language was framed; but the same tendency may be 
daily observed in children. Children and savages use 
only nouns or names of things, which they convert into 
verbs, and apply to analogous mental acts. 

2. But this origin of all words that convey a spirit¬ 
ual import,—so conspicuous a fact in the history of 
language,—is our least debt to nature. It is not words 
only that are emblematic; it is things which are em¬ 
blematic. Every natural fact is a symbol of some 
spiritual fact. Every appearance in nature corre¬ 
sponds to some state of the mind, and that state of 
the mind can only be described by presenting that 
natural appearance as its picture. An enraged man is 
a lion, a cunning man is a fox, a firm man is a rock, 
a learned man is a torch. A lamb is innocence; a 
snake is subtle spite; flowers express to us the delicate 
affections. Light and darkness are our familiar ex¬ 
pression for knowledge and ignorance; and heat for 
love. Visible distance behind and before us, is re¬ 
spectively our image of memory and hope. 

Who looks upon a river in a meditative hour and 
is not reminded of the flux of all things ? Throw a 
stone into the stream, and the circles that propagate 
themselves are the beautiful type of all influence. 
Man is conscious of a universal soul within^ or behind 
his individual life, wherein, as in a firmament, the na¬ 
tures of Justice, Truth, Love, Freedom, arise and 
shine. This universal soul he calls Reason: it is not 
mine, or thine, or his, but we are its; we are its prop- 


36 


NATURE 


erty and men. And the blue sky in which the private 
earth is buried, the sky with its eternal calm, and full 
of everlasting orbs, is the type of Reason. That which 
intellectually considered we call Reason, considered in 
relation to nature, we call Spirit. Spirit is the Cre¬ 
ator. Spirit hath life in itself. And man in all ages 
and countries embodies it in his language as the 
Father. 

It is easily seen that there is nothing lucky or ca¬ 
pricious in these analogies, but that they are constant, 
and pervade nature. These are not the dreams of a 
few poets, here and there, but man is an analogist, and 
studies relations in all objects. He is placed in the 
center of beings, and a ray of relation passes from 
every other being to him. And neither can man be 
understood without these objects, nor these objects 
without man. All the facts in natural history taken 
by themselves, have no value, but are barren, like a 
single sex. But marry it to human history, and it is 
full of life. Whole floras, all Linnaeus’s 1 and Buff on’s 2 
volumes, are dry catalogues of facts; but the most 
trivial of these facts, the habit of a plant, the organs, 
or work, or noise of an insect, applied to the illustra¬ 
tion of a fact in intellectual philosophy, or in any way 
associated to human nature, affects us in the most 
lively and agreeable manner. The seed of a plant,— 
to what affecting analogies in the nature of man is 


1. Linnaeus. A celebrated Swedish botanist (1707-1778), founder 
of the “Linnaean System” for the analysis and classification of 
plants and flowers. 

2. Buffon. An eminent French naturalist (1707-1788), author of 
many important works in natural history, as the “History of 
Domestic Animals,” “ History of Birds,” and “ Epochs of Nature.” 



LANGUAGE 


37 


that little fruit made use of, in all discourse, up to 
the voice of Paul, who calls the human corpse a seed, 
—“ It is sown a natural body; it is raised a spiritual 
body.” 1 The motion of the earth round its axis and 
round the sun, makes the day and the year. These 
are certain amounts of brute light and heat. But is 
there no intent of an analogy between man’s life and 
the seasons? And do the seasons gain no grandeur 
or pathos from that analogy? The instincts of the 
ant are very unimportant considered as the ant’s; but 
the moment a ray of relation is seen to extend from 
it to man, and the little drudge is seen to be a monitor, 
a little body with a mighty heart, then all its habits, 
even that said to be recently observed, that it never 
sleeps, 2 become sublime. 

Because of this radical correspondence between visi¬ 
ble things and human thoughts, savages, who have only 
what is necessary, converse in figures. As we go back 
in history, language becomes more picturesque, until 
its infancy, when it is all poetry; or all spiritual facts 
are represented by natural symbols. The same sym¬ 
bols are found to make the original elements of all 
languages. It has moreover been observed, that the 
idioms of all languages approach each other in pas¬ 
sages of the greatest eloquence and power. And as 
this is the first language, so is it the last. This imme¬ 
diate dependence of language upon nature, this con¬ 
version of an outward phenomenon into a type of 


1. “ It is sown,” etc. “ 1 Corinthians” xv. 44. 

2. Never sleeps. Later observations have reversed this opinion. 
Romanes says: “It is probable that all species of ants enjoy 
periods of true sleep alternating with those of activity.” See 
“Animal Intelligence,” by George J. Romanes, p. 84. 




38 


NATURE 


somewhat in human life, never loses its power to affect 
us. It is this which gives that piquancy to the con¬ 
versation of a strong-natured farmer or backwoods¬ 
man, which all men relish. 

A man’s power to connect his thought with its proper 
symbol, and so to utter it, depends on the simplicity 

of his character, that is, upon his love of truth and his 

* _ 

desire to communicate it without loss. The corruption 
of man is followed by the corruption of language. 
When simplicity of character and the sovereignty of 
ideas are broken up by the prevalence of secondary 
desires, the desire of riches, of pleasure, of power, and 
of praise,—and duplicity and falsehood take place of 
simplicity and truth, the power over nature as an in¬ 
terpreter of the will is in a degree lost; new imagery 
ceases to be created, and old words are perverted to 
stand for things wdiich are not; a paper currency is 
employed, when there is no bullion in the vaults. In 
due time the fraud is manifest, and words lose all 
power to stimulate the understanding or the affections. 
Hundreds of writers may be found in every long- 
civilized nation w T ho for a short time believe and make 
others believe that they see and utter truths, who do 
not of themselves clothe one thought in its natural 
garment, but who feed unconsciously on the language 
created by the primary writers of the country, those, 
namely, who hold primarily on nature. 

But wise men pierce this rotten diction and fasten 
words again to visible things; so that picturesque lan¬ 
guage is at once a commanding certificate that he who 
employs it is a man in alliance with truth and God. 
The moment our discourse rises above the ground line 
of familiar facts and is inflamed with passion or ex- 


LANGUAGE 


39 


alted by thought, it clothes itself in images. A man 
conversing in earnest, if he watch his intellectual 
processes, will find that a material image more or less 
luminous arises in his mind, contemporaneous with 
every thought, which furnishes the vestment of the 
thought. Hence, good writing and brilliant discourse 
are perpetual allegories. This imagery is spontaneous. 
It is the blending of experience with the present action 
of the mind. It is proper creation. It is the working 
of the Original Cause through the instruments he has 
already made. 

These facts may suggest the advantage which the 
country-life possesses, for a powerful mind, over the 
artificial and curtailed life of cities. We know more 
from nature than we can at will communicate. Its 
light flows into the mind evermore, and we forget its 
presence. The poet, the orator, bred in the woods, 
whose senses have been nourished by their fair and ap¬ 
peasing changes, year after year, without design and 
without heed,—shall not lose their lesson altogether, 
in the roar of cities or the broil of politics. Long 
hereafter, amidst agitation and terror in national 
councils,—in the hour of revolution,—these solemn im¬ 
ages shall reappear in their morning luster, as fit sym¬ 
bols and words of the thoughts which the passing 
events shall awaken. At the call of a noble sentiment, 
again the woods wave, the pines murmur, the river 
rolls and shines, and the cattle low upon the moun¬ 
tains, as he saw and heard them in his infancy. And 
with these forms, the spells of persuasion, the keys 
of power are put into his hands. 

3. We are thus assisted by natural objects in the 
expression of particular meanings. But how great a 


40 


NATURE 


language to convey such pepper-corn informations! 
Did it need such noble races of creatures, this pro¬ 
fusion of forms, this host of orbs in heaven, to furnish 
man with the dictionary and grammar of his munici¬ 
pal speech? Whilst we use this grand cipher 1 to ex¬ 
pedite the affairs of our pot and kettle, we feel that we 
have not yet put it to its use, neither are able. We 
are like travelers using the cinders of a volcano to 
roast their eggs. Whilst we see that it always stands 
ready to clothe what we would say, we cannot avoid 
the question whether the characters are not significant 
of themselves. Have mountains, and waves, and skies, 
no significance but what we consciously give them 
when w r e employ them as emblems of our thoughts? 
The world is emblematic. Parts of speech are meta¬ 
phors, because the whole of nature is a metaphor of the 
human mind. The laws of moral nature answer to 
those of matter as face to face in a glass. “ The visi¬ 
ble world and the relation of its parts, is the dial plate 
of the invisible.” 2 The axioms of physics translate the 
laws of ethics. Thus, “ the whole is greater than its 
part; ” “ reaction is equal to action; ” “ the smallest 
weight may be made to lift the greatest, the difference 
of weight being compensated by time; ” and many 
the like propositions, which have an ethical as well as 
physical sense. These propositions have a much more 
extensive and universal sense when applied to human 
life, than when confined to technical use. 

1. Cipher. Any secret form of writing, or method of expressing 
a hidden meaning by writing. Government dispatches are sent 
“in cipher.” 

2. “ The visible world,” etc. Elsewhere Emerson says: “The 
visible creation is the terminus or the circumference of the in¬ 
visible world.” 



LANGUAGE 


41 


In like manner, the memorable words of history and 
the proverbs of nations consist usually of a natural 
fact, selected as a picture or parable of a moral truth. 
Thus; “ A rolling stone gathers no moss ”; “A bird in 
the hand is worth two in the bush “ A cripple in the 
right way will beat a racer in the wrong ”; “ Make hay 
while the sun shines ”; “ ’Tis hard to carry a full cup 
even “ Vinegar is the son of wine “ The last ounce 
broke the camel’s back ”; “ Long-lived trees make roots 
first ”;—and the like. In their primary sense these are 
trivial facts, but we repeat them for the value of their 
analogical import. What is true of proverbs, is true of 
all fables, parables, and allegories. 

This relation between the mind and matter is not 
fancied by some poet, but stands in the will of God, 
and so is free to be known by all men. It appears to 
men, or it does not appear. When in fortunate hours 
we ponder this miracle, the wise man doubts if at all 
other times he is not blind and deaf; 

Can these things be, 

And overcome us like a summer’s cloud, 

Without our special wonder ? 1 

for the universe becomes transparent, and the light 
of higher laws than its own shines through it. It is 
the standing problem which has exercised the wonder 
and the study of every fine genius since the world 
began; from the era of the Egyptians 2 and the Brah- 

1. “Can these things be,” etc. From “Macbeth,” Act III. sc. 4. 
The correct form of the quotation is, “ Can such things be,” etc. 

2. From the era of the Egyptians. The earliest philosophers 
were in Egypt and India. The Brahmins are the Hindoos of the 
highest or priestly caste, the spiritual philosophers. Pythagoras , 
a famous Greek philosopher, founded a school of philosophy at 
Crotona. Plato founded the school of the “ Academy,” and repre- 



42 


NATURE 


mins to that of Pythagoras, of Plato, of Bacon, of 
Leibnitz, of Swedenborg. There sits the Sphinx * 1 at the 
road-side, and from age to age, as each prophet comes 
by, he tries his fortune at reading her riddle. There^ 
seems to be a necessity in spirit to manifest itself in 
material forms; and day and night, river and storm, 
beast and bird, acid and alkali, pre-exist in necessary 
Ideas in the mind of God, and are what they are by 
virtue of preceding affections in the world of spirit. 
A Fact is the end or last issue of spirit. The visible 
creation is the terminus or the circumference of the 
invisible world. “Material objects,” said a French 
philosopher, “ are necessarily kinds of scorice 2 of the 
substantial thoughts of the Creator, which must al¬ 
ways preserve an exact relation to their first origin; 
in other words, visible nature must have a spiritual 
and moral side.” 

This doctrine is abstruse, and though the images 
of “ garment,” “ scoriae,” “ mirror,” etc., may stimu¬ 
late the fancy, we must summon the aid of subtler and 
more vital expositors to make it plain. “ Every 


sents the finest achievements of Greek philosophy. Leibnitz (1646- 
1716), a German philosopher and mathematician, invented the dif¬ 
ferential calculus and evolved the doctrine of the monad to ex¬ 
plain the living principle of the universe. Swedenborg (1688- 
1772), a Swedish philosopher, was the founder of the New Church. 
His theology was presented in the form of revelations or “visions” 
of a mystical character. See Emerson’s “Representative Men.” 

1. Sphinx. According to Greek mythology, the Sphinx was a 
female monster who sat by the roadside and proposed a riddle to 
the Thebans who passed by, strangling those who could not guess 
it. At last (Edipus guessed the riddle, and, in accordance with the 
conditions, the monster killed herself. 

2. Scoriae. The plural of scoria. The cinder, slag, or volcanic 
rock thrown out by volcanic eruptions. 





DISCIPLINE 


43 


scripture is to be interpreted by the same spirit which 
gave it forth,”—is the fundamental law of criticism. 
A life in harmony with nature, the love of truth and 
of virtue, will purge the eyes to understand her text. 
By degrees we may come to know the primitive sense 
of the permanent objects of nature, so that the world 
shall be to us an open book, and every form significant 
of its hidden life and final cause. 

A new interest surprises us, whilst, under the view 
now suggested, we contemplate the fearful extent and 
multitude of objects; since “every object rightly seen, 
unlocks a new faculty of the soul.” That which was 
unconscious truth, becomes, when interpreted and de¬ 
fined in an object, a part of the domain of knowledge, 
—a new weapon in the magazine of power. 

CHAPTER V 

DISCIPLINE 

In view of the significance of nature, we arrive at 
once at a new fact, that nature is a discipline. This 
use of the word includes the preceding uses, as parts 
of itself. 

Space, time, society, labor, climate, food, locomo¬ 
tion, the animals, the mechanical forces, give us sin- 
cerest lessons, day by day, wdiose meaning is unlim¬ 
ited. They educate both the understanding and the 
reason. Every property of matter is a school for the 
understanding,—its solidity or resistance, its inertia, 
its extension, its figure, its divisibility. The under¬ 
standing adds, divides, combines, measures, and finds 
nutriment and room for its activity in this worthy 
scene. Meantime, Reason transfers all these lessons 


44 


Nature 


into its own world of thought, by perceiving the anal¬ 
ogy that marries Matter and Mind. 

1. Nature is a discipline of the understanding in 
intellectual truths. Our dealing with sensible objects 
is a constant exercise in the necessary lessons of differ¬ 
ence, of likeness, of order, of being and seeming, of 
progressive arrangement; of ascent from particular to 
general; of combination to one end of manifold forces. 
Proportioned to the importance of the organ to be 
formed, is the extreme care with which its tuition is 
provided,—a care pretermitted in no single case. 
What tedious training, day after day, year after year, 
never ending, to form the common sense; what con¬ 
tinual reproduction of annoyances, inconveniences, di¬ 
lemmas; what rejoicing over us of little men; what 
disputing of prices, what reckonings of interest,—and 
all to form the hand of the mind;—to instruct us 
that “good thoughts are no better than good dreams, 
unless they be executed! ” 

The same good office is performed by property and 
its filial systems of debt and credit. Debt, grinding 
debt, whose iron face the widow, the orphan, and the 
sons of genius fear and hate;—debt, which consumes 
so much time, which so cripples and disheartens a 
great spirit with cares that seem so base, is a preceptor 
whose lessons cannot be foregone, and is needed most 
by those who suffer from it most. Moreover, property, 
which has been well compared to snow,—“ if it fall 
level to-day, it will be blown into drifts to-morrow,” 
—is the surface action of internal machinery, like the 
index on the face of a clock. Whilst now it is the 
gymnastics of the understanding, it is hiving, in the 
foresight of the spirit, experience in profounder laws. 


DISCIPLINE 


45 


The whole character and fortune of the individual 
are affected by the least inequalities in the culture 
of the understanding; for example, in the perception 
of differences. Therefore is Space, and therefore 
Time, that man may know that things are not huddled 
and lumped, but sundered and individual. A bell and 
a plow have each their use, and neither can do the 
office of the other. Water is good to drink, coal to 
burn, wool to wear; but wool cannot be drunk, nor 
water spun, nor coal eaten. The wise man shows his 
wusdorn in separation, in gradation, and his scale of 
creatures and of merits is as wide as nature. The 
foolish have no range in their scale, but suppose every 
man is as every other man. What is not good they 
call the worst, and what is not hateful, they call the 
best. 

In like manner, what good heed nature forms in 
us! She pardons no mistakes. Her yea is yea, and 
her nay, nay. 

The first steps in agriculture, astronomy, zoology 
(those first steps which the farmer, the hunter, and 
the sailor take), teach that nature’s dice 1 are always 
loaded; that in her heaps and rubbish are concealed 
sure and useful results. 

IIow calmly and genially the mind apprehends one 
after another the laws of physics! What noble emo¬ 
tions dilate the mortal as he enters into the counsels 
of the creation, and feels by knowledge the privilege to 
Be! His insight refines him. The beauty of nature 
shines in his own breast. Man is greater that he can 

1. Dice. Loaded dice are dice that have one face made heavier 
than the others, so that when shaken they will always fall as de¬ 
sired by the dishonest player. 



46 


NATURE 


see this, and the universe less, because time and space 
relations vanish as laws are known. 

Here again we are impressed and even daunted by 
the immense universe to be explored. “ What we 
know is a point to what we do not know.” Open any 
recent journal of science, and weigh the problems sug¬ 
gested concerning light, heat, electricity, magnet¬ 
ism, physiology, geology, and judge whether the inter¬ 
est of natural science is likely to be soon exhausted. 

Passing by many particulars of the discipline of 
nature, we must not omit to specify two. 

The exercise of the will, or the lesson of power, is 
taught in every event. From the child’s successive 
possession of his several senses up to the hour when 
he saith, “ Thy will be done! ” he is learning the secret 
that he can reduce under his will, not only particular 
events but great classes, nay, the whole series of events, 
and so conform all facts to his character. Nature is 
thoroughly mediate. 1 It is made to serve. It receives 
the dominion of man as meekly as the ass on which 
the Saviour rode. It offers all its kingdoms to man 
as the raw material which he may mold into what is 
useful. Man is never weary of working it up. He 
forges the subtile and delicate air into wise and 
melodious words, and gives them wing as angels of 
persuasion and command. One after another his vic¬ 
torious thought comes up with and reduces all things, 
until the world becomes at last only a realized will,— 
the double of the man. 

2. Sensible objects conform to the premonitions of 
reason and reflect the conscience. All things are 

1. Mediate. That which is used as a means or medium ; not im¬ 
mediate, direct, or final. 




DISCIPLINE 


47 


moral; and in their boundless changes have an un¬ 
ceasing reference to spiritual nature. Therefore is 
nature glorious with form, color, and motion; that 
every globe in the remotest heaven, every chemical 
change from the rudest crystal up to the laws of life, 
every change of vegetation from the first principle of 
growth in the eye of a leaf, to the tropical forest and 
antediluvian coal-mine, every animal function from 
the sponge up to Hercules, shall hint or thunder to 
man the laws of right and wrong, and echo the Ten 
Commandments. Therefore is nature ever the ally of 
religion: lends all her pomp and riches to the religious 
sentiment. Prophet and priest, David, Isaiah, Jesus, 
have drawn deeply from this source. This ethical 
character so penetrates the bone and marrow of nature, 
as to seem the end for which it was made. Whatever 
private purpose is answered by any member or part, 
this is its public and universal function, and is never 
omitted. Nothing in nature is exhausted in its first 
use. When a thing has served an end to the utter¬ 
most, it is wholly new for an ulterior service. In God, 
> every end is converted into a new means. Thus the 
use of commodity, regarded by itself, is mean and 
squalid. But it is to the mind an education in the 
doctrine of use, namely, that a thing is good only so 
far as it serves; that a conspiring of parts and efforts 
to the production of an end is essential to any being. 
The first and gross manifestation of this truth is our 
inevitable and hated training in values and wants, in 
corn 1 and meat. 

It has already been illustrated, that every natural 
process is a version of a moral sentence. The moral 


1. Com. Used here in the old sense of grain. 




48 


NATURE 


law lies at the center of nature and radiates to the 
circumference. It is the pith and marrow of every 
substance, every relation, and every process. All 
things with which we deal, preach to us. What is a 
farm but a mute gospel? The chaff and the wheat, 
weeds and plants, blight, rain, insects, sun,—it is a 
sacred emblem from the first furrow of spring to the 
last stack which the snow of winter overtakes in the 
fields. But the sailor, the shepherd, the miner, the 
merchant, in their several resorts, have each an experi¬ 
ence precisely parallel, and leading to the same con¬ 
clusion: because all organizations are radically alike. 
Nor can it be doubted that this moral sentiment which 
thus scents the air, grows in the grain, and impreg¬ 
nates the waters of the world, is caught by man and 
sinks into his soul. The moral influence of nature 
upon every individual is that amount of truth which it 
illustrates to him. Who can estimate this? Who can 
guess how much firmness the sea-beaten rock has 
taught the fisherman? how much tranquillity has been 
reflected to man from the azure sky, over whose un¬ 
spotted deeps the winds forevermore drive flocks of 
stormy clouds, and leave no wrinkle or stain? how 
much industry and providence and affection we have 
caught from the pantomime of brutes ? What a search¬ 
ing preacher of self-command is the varying phenome¬ 
non of health! 

Herein is especially apprehended the unity of na¬ 
ture,—the unity in variety,—which meets us every¬ 
where. All the endless variety of things make an 
identical impression. Xenophanes 1 complained in his 


1. Xenophanes. A distinguished Greek philosopher, founder of 
the Eleatic school, and author of a didactic poem “ On Nature.” 



DISCIPLINE 


49 


old age, that, look where he would, all things hastened 
back to unity. He was weary of seeing the same en¬ 
tity in the tedious variety of forms. The fable of 
Proteus 1 has a cordial truth. A leaf, a drop, a crystal, 
a moment of time, is related to the whole, and par¬ 
takes of the perfection of the whole. Each particle 
is a microcosm, and faithfully renders the likeness of 
the world. 

Hot only resemblances exist in things whose analogy 
is obvious, as when we detect the type of the human 
hand in the flipper of the fossil saurus, but also in 
objects wherein there is great superficial unlikeness. 
Thus architecture is called “ frozen music ,” 2 by De 
Stael and Goethe. Vitruvius 3 thought an architect 
should be a musician. “ A Gothic church,” said 
Coleridge, “ is a petrified religion.” Michael Angelo 
maintained, that, to an architect, a knowledge of anat¬ 
omy is essential. In Haydn’s 4 oratorios, the notes pre¬ 
sent to the imagination not only motions, as of the 
snake, the stag, and the elephant, but colors also; as 
the green grass. The law of harmonic sounds reap- 


1. Proteus. A character in classic mythology who had the power 
of assuming different shapes ; hence the adjective protean , exceed¬ 
ingly variable. 

2. Frozen music. This happy phrase is attributed also to Schle- 
gel and Schelling. Madame de Stciel (1766-1817) was a brilliant 
Frenchwoman, author of “Corinne” and “L’Allemagne.” 
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832), the greatest German 
author, wrote “Faust,” “ Iphigenie,” “Hermann und Dorothea,” 
and other celebrated works. 

3. Vitruvius. A famous Roman architect and military engineer 
under Caesar and Augustus, the author of an important treatise, 
“De Architectural’ 

4. Haydn. A great Austrian composer (1732-1809), whose most 
celebrated composition is the “ Creation.” 



50 


NATURE 


pears in the harmonic colors. The granite is differ¬ 
enced in its laws only by the more or less of heat from 
the river that wears it away. The river, as it flows, 
resembles the air that flows over it; the air resembles 
the light which traverses it with more subtile currents; 
the light resembles the heat which rides with it 
through space. Each creature is only a modification 
of the other; 1 the likeness in them is more than the 
difference, and their radical law is one and the same. 
A rule of one art, or a law of one organization, holds 
true throughout nature. So intimate is this unity, 
that, it is easily seen, it lies under the undermost gar¬ 
ment of nature, and betrays its source in universal 
spirit. For it pervades thought also. Every uni¬ 
versal truth which we express in words, implies or sup¬ 
poses every other truth. “ Omne verum vero con- 
sonat.” 2 It is like a great circle on a sphere, compris¬ 
ing all possible circles; which, however, may be drawn 
and comprise it in like manner. Every such truth is 
the absolute ens 3 seen from one side. But it has in¬ 
numerable sides. 

The central unity is still more conspicuous in 
actions. Words are finite organs of the infinite mind. 
They cannot cover the dimensions of what is in truth. 
They break, chop, and impoverish it. An action is 
the perfection and publication of thought. A right 
action seems to fill the eye, and to be related to all 
nature. “ The wise man, in doing one thing, does all; 

1. Each creature, etc. This idea has been scientifically worked 
out in more recent times as the “ Correlation of energies or forces.” 

2. “ Omne verum vero consonat.” All truth agrees with truth. 

3. Ens. An existing object or concrete thing. Distinguished 
from the abstract entity, existence. Both are from the root forms 
of esse, to be. 



DISCIPLINE 


51 


or, in the one thing he does rightly, he sees the like¬ 
ness of all which is done rightly.” 

Words and actions are not the attributes of brute na¬ 
ture. They introduce us to the human form, of which 
all other organizations appear to be degradations. 
When this appears among so many that surround it, 
the spirit prefers it to all others. It says, “ From such 
as this have I drawn joy and knowledge; in such as 
this have I found and beheld myself; I will speak to 
it; it can speak again; it can yield me thought already 
formed and alive.” In fact, the eye,—the mind,—is 
always accompanied by these forms, male and female; 
and these are incomparably the richest informations 
of the power and order that lie at the heart of things. 
Unfortunately every one of them bears the marks as 
of some injury; is marred and superficially defective. 
Nevertheless, far different from the deaf and dumb 
nature around them, these all rest like fountain-pipes 
on the unfathomed sea of thought and virtue whereto 
they alone, of all organizations, are the entrances. 

It were a pleasant inquiry to follow into detail their 
ministry to our education, but where would it stop? 
We are associated in adolescent and adult life with 
some friends, who, like skies and waters, are coex¬ 
tensive with our idea; who, answering each to a cer¬ 
tain affection of the soul, satisfy our desire on that 
side; whom we lack power to put at such focal dis¬ 
tance from us, that we can mend or even analyze 
them. We cannot choose but love them. When much 
intercourse with a friend has supplied us with a 
standard of excellence, and has increased our respect 
for the resources of God who thus sends a real person 
to outgo our ideal; when he has, moreover, become an 


52 


NATURE 


object of thought, and, whilst his character retains 
all its unconscious effect, is converted in the mind into 
solid and sweet wisdom,—it is a sign to us that his 
office is closing, and he is commonly withdrawn from 
our sight in a short time. 


CHAPTER YI 

IDEALISM 

Thus is the unspeakable but intelligible and practi¬ 
cable meaning of the world conveyed to man, the im¬ 
mortal pupil, in every object of sense. To this one end 
of discipline, all parts of nature conspire. 

A noble doubt perpetually suggests itself,—whether 
this end be not the final cause of the universe; and 
whether nature outwardly exists. It is a sufficient 
account of that appearance we call the world, that 
God will teach a human mind, and so makes it the 
receiver of a certain number of congruent sensations, 
wdiich we call sun and moon, man and woman, house 
and trade. In my utter impotence to test the au¬ 
thenticity of the report of my senses, to know whether 
the impressions they make on me correspond with out¬ 
lying objects, what difference does it make, whether 
Orion 1 is up there in heaven, or some god paints the 
image in the firmament of the soul? The relations of 
parts and the end of the whole remaining the same, 
what is the difference, whether land and sea interact, 
and worlds revolve and intermingle without number or 

1. Orion. A constellation represented by the giant hunter of 
Greek mythology. It consists of seven very bright stars, four 
forming a quadrangle and three in the middle forming the “ belt.” 




IDEALISM 


53 


end,—deep yawning under deep, and galaxy balancing 
galaxy, throughout absolute space,—or whether, with¬ 
out relations of time and space, the same appearances 
are inscribed in the constant faith of man? Whether 
nature enjoy a substantial existence without, or is 
only in the apocalypse of the mind, it is alike useful 
and alike venerable to me. Be it what it may, it is 
ideal to me so long as I cannot try the accuracy of 
my senses. 

The frivolous make themselves merry with the Ideal 
theory , 1 as if its consequences were burlesque; as if it 
affected the stability of nature. It surely does not. 
God never jests with us, and will not compromise the 
end of nature by permitting any inconsequence in its 
procession. Any distrust of the permanence of laws 
would paralyze the faculties of man. Their perma¬ 
nence is sacredly respected, and his faith therein is 
perfect. The wheels and springs of man are all set 
to the hypothesis of the permanence of nature. We 
are not built like a ship to be tossed, but like a house 
to stand. It is a natural consequence of this structure, 
that so long as the active powers predominate over the 

1. Ideal theory. This refers to the Idealism of Bishop Berkeley, 
which is defined as “ the doctrine that the souls of men and of God, 
and the ideas in them, are the only existences, and that the reality 
of external things consists only in their permanence and coher¬ 
ency.” 

Dr. Johnson’s refutation of this theory is famous, as given by 
Boswell: “ We stood talking for some time together of Bishop 
Berkeley’s ingenious sophistry to prove the non-existence of mat¬ 
ter, and that everything in the universe is merely ideal. I ob¬ 
served that, though we are satisfied 'his doctrine is not true, it is 
impossible to refute it. I never shall forget the alacrity with which 
Johnson answered, striking his foot with mighty force against a 
large stone, till he rebounded from it—‘ I refute it thus.' ” 




54 


NATURE 


reflective, we resist with indignation any hint that 
nature is more short-lived or mutable than spirit. The 
broker, the wheelright, the carpenter, the tollman, are 
much displeased at the intimation. 

But whilst we acquiesce entirely in the permanence 
of natural laws, the question of the absolute existence 
of nature still remains open. It is the uniform effect 
of culture on the human mind, not to shake our faith 
in the stability of particular phenomena, as of heat, 
water, azote ; 1 but to lead us to regard nature as phe¬ 
nomenon, not a substance; to attribute necessary ex¬ 
istence to spirit; to esteem nature as an accident and 
an effect. 

To the senses and the unrenewed understanding, 
belongs a sort of instinctive belief in the absolute ex¬ 
istence of nature. In their view man and nature are 
indissolubly joined. Things are ultimates, and they 
never look beyond their sphere. The presence of rea¬ 
son mars this faith. The first effort of thought tends 
to relax this despotism of the senses which binds us 
to nature as if we were a part of it, and shows 
us nature aloof, and, as it were, afloat. Until this 
higher agency intervenes, the animal eye sees, with 
wonderful accuracy, sharp outlines and colored sur¬ 
faces. When the eye of reason opens, to outline and 
surface are at once added grace and expression. These 
proceed from imagination and affection, and abate 
somewhat of the angular distinctness of objects. If 
the reason be stimulated to more earnest vision, out¬ 
lines and surfaces become transparent, and are no 
longer seen; causes and spirits are seen through them. 
The best moments of life are these delicious awaken- 


1. Azote. An old name for nitrogen. 



IDEALISM 


55 


ings of the higher powers, and the reverential with¬ 
drawing of nature before its God. 

Let us proceed to indicate the effects of culture. 
1. Our first institution 1 in the Ideal philosophy is a 
hint from nature herself. 

Nature is made to conspire with spirit to emanci¬ 
pate us. Certain mechanical changes, a small altera¬ 
tion in our local position, apprises us of a dualism. 
We are strangely affected by seeing the shore from a 
moving ship, from a balloon, or through the tints of 
an unusual sky. The least change in our point of view 
gives the whole world a pictorial air. A man who 
seldom rides, needs only to get into a coach and 
traverse his own town, to turn the street into a puppet- 
show. The men, the women,—talking, running, bar¬ 
tering, fighting,—the earnest mechanic, the lounger, 
the beggar, the boys, the dogs, are unrealized at once, 
or, at least, wholly detached from all relation to the 
observer, and seen as apparent, not substantial beings. 
What 1 new thoughts are suggested by seeing a face of 
country quite familiar, in the rapid movement of the 
railroad car! Nay, the most wonted objects, (make 
a very slight change in the point of vision,) please us 
most. In a camera obscura, the butcher’s cart, and the 
figure of one of our own family amuse us. So a por¬ 
trait of a well-known face gratifies us. Turn the eyes 
upside down, by looking at the landscape through 
your legs, and how agreeable is the picture, though you 
have seen it any time these twenty years! 

In these cases, by mechanical means, is suggested 
the difference between the observer and the spectacle, 
—between man and nature. Hence arises a pleasure 


1. Institution. Fundamental or established principle. 



56 


NATURE 


mixed with awe; I may say, a low degree of the sub¬ 
lime is felt, from the fact, probably, that man is hereby 
apprised that whilst the world is a spectacle, something 
in himself is stable. 

2. In a higher manner the poet communicates the 
same pleasure. By a few strokes he delineates, as on 
air, the sun, the mountain, the camp, the city, the hero, 
the maiden, not different from what we know them, but 
only lifted from the ground and afloat before the eye. 
He unfixes the land and the sea, makes them revolve 
around the axis of his primary thought, and disposes 
them anew. Possessed himself by a heroic passion, he 
uses matter as symbols of it. The sensual man con¬ 
forms thoughts to things; the poet conforms things to 
his thoughts. The one esteems nature as rooted and 
fast; the other, as fluid, and impresses his being 
thereon. To him, the refractory world is ductile and 
flexible; he invests dust and stones with humanity, and 
makes them the words of the reason. The imagina¬ 
tion may be defined to be the use which the reason 
makes of the material world. Shakspere possesses 
the power of subordinating nature for the purposes 
of expression, beyond all poets. His imperial muse 
tosses the creation like a bauble from hand to hand, 
and uses it to embody any caprice of thought that 
is uppermost in his mind. The remotest spaces of 
nature are visited, and the farthest sundered things 
are brought together, by a subtile spiritual connection. 
We are made aware that magnitude of material things 
is relative, and all objects shrink and expand to serve 
the passion of the poet. Thus in his sonnets, the lays 
of birds, the scents and dyes of flowers he finds to be 
the shadow of his beloved; time, which keeps her from 


IDEALISM 


57 


him, is his chest; the suspicion she has awakened, is 
her ornament; 

The ornament of beauty is Snspect, 

A crow which flies in heaven’s sweetest air. 1 

His passion is not the fruit of chance; it swells, as 
he speaks, to a city, or a state. 

No, it was builded far from accident; 

It suffers not in smiling pomp, nor falls 
Under the brow of thralling discontent; 

It fears not policy, that heretic, 

That works on leases of short numbered hours, 

But all alone stands hugely politic. 

In the strength of his constancy, the Pyramids seem 
to him recent and transitory. The freshness of youth 
and love dazzles him with its resemblance to morning; 

Take those lips away 
Which so sweetly were forsworn ; 

And those eyes,—the break of day, 

Lights that do mislead the morn. 2 

The wild beauty of this hyperbole, I may say in pass¬ 
ing, it would not be easy to match in literature. 

This transfiguration which all material objects un¬ 
dergo through the passion of the poet,—this power 
which he exerts to dwarf the great, to magnify the 
small,—might be illustrated by a thousand examples 
from his plays. I have before me The Tempest, and 
will cite only these few lines. 


1. “The ornament of beauty,” etc. From Sonnet 70. The quota¬ 
tion following is from Sonnet 124. 

2. “ Take those lips,” etc. This song, beginning : 

“Take, oh take, those lips away,” 

is in “ Measure for Measure,” Act IV. sc. 1. It occurs also in 
Beaumont and Fletcher’s “ Bloody Brother,” Act V., with a pretty 
additional stanza. 



58 


NATURE 


Akiel. The strong based promontory 

Have I made shake, and by the spurs plucked up 
The pine and cedar. 


Prospero calls for music to soothe the frantic Alonzo, 

and his companions; 

A solemn air, and the best comforter 
To an unsettled fancy, cure thy brains 
Now useless, boiled within thy skull. 


Again; 


The charm dissolves apace, 

And, as the morning steals upon the night, 
Melting the darkness, so their rising senses 
Begin to chase the ignorant fumes that mantle 
Their clearer reason. 

Their understanding 

Begins to swell: and the approaching tide 
Will shortly fill the reasonable shores 
That now lie foul and muddy. 


The perception of real affinities between events 
(that is to say, of ideal affinities, for those only are 
real), enables the poet thus to make free with the 
most imposing forms and phenomena of the world, 
and to assert the predominance of the soul. 

3. Whilst thus the poet animates nature with his 
own thoughts, he differs from the philosopher only 
herein, that the one proposes beauty as his main end; 
the other truth. But the philosopher, not less than 
the poet, postpones the apparent order and relations of 
things to the empire of thought. “ The problem of 
philosophy,” according to Plato, “ is, for all that exists 
conditionally, to find a ground unconditioned and ab¬ 
solute.” It proceeds on the faith that a law deter¬ 
mines all phenomena, which being known, the phe¬ 
nomena can be predicted. That law, when in the 
mind, is an idea. Its beauty is infinite. The true 


IDEALISM 


59 


philosopher and the true poet are one, and a beauty, 
which is truth, 1 and a truth, which is beauty, is the 
aim of both. Is not the charm of one of Plato’s or 
Aristotle’s definitions strictly like that of the Antig¬ 
one 2 of Sophocles ? It is, in both cases, that a spirit¬ 
ual life has been imparted to nature; that the solid 
seeming block of matter has been pervaded and dis¬ 
solved by a thought; that this feeble human being has 
penetrated the vast masses of nature with an inform¬ 
ing soul, and recognized itself in their harmony, that 
is, seized their law. In physics, when this is attained, 
the memory disburdens itself of its cumbrous cata¬ 
logues of particulars, and carries centuries of ob¬ 
servation in a single formula. 

Thus even in physics, the material is degraded be¬ 
fore the spiritual. The astronomer, the geometer, rely 
on their irrefragable analysis, and disdain the results 
of observation. The sublime remark of Euler 3 on his 
law of arches, “ This will be found contrary to all ex¬ 
perience, yet is true; ” had already transferred nature 
into the mind, and left matter like an outcast corpse. 

4. Intellectual science has been observed to beget 
invariably a doubt of the existence of matter. Turgot 4 

1. Beauty, which is truth. Compare Keats’s lines, in “Ode on 
a Grecian Urn” : 

“ Beauty is truth, truth beauty—that is all 
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.” 

2. Antigone. One of the splendid tragedies of the Greek dra¬ 
matic poet Sophocles. ♦ 

3. Euler. A celebrated Swiss mathematician (1707-1783), who 
did much of his work after being stricken blind. His most famous 
works are “ Letters to a German Princess,” covering a large variety 
of scientific topics, and an “Introduction to Algebra.” 

4. Turgot. A French statesman, political economist, and finan¬ 
cier (1727-1781). He was minister of finance under Louis XYI. 



60 


NATURE 


said, “ He that has never doubted the existence of 
matter, may be assured he has no aptitude for meta¬ 
physical inquiries.” It fastens the attention upon 
immortal necessary uncreated natures, that is, upon 
ideas; and in their presence we feel that the outward 
circumstance is a dream and a shade. Whilst we wait 
in this Olympus of gods, we think of nature as an 
appendix to the soul. We ascend into their region, 
and know that these are the thoughts of the Supreme 
Being. “ These are they * 1 who were set up from ever¬ 
lasting, from the beginning, or ever the earth was. 
When he prepared, the heavens, they were there; when 
he established the clouds above, when he strengthened 
the fountains of the deep. Then they were by him, 
as one brought up with him. Of them took he 
counsel.” 

Their influence is proportionate. As objects of 
science they are accessible to few men. Yet all men 
are capable of being raised by piety or by passion, into 
their region. And no man touches these divine na¬ 
tures, without becoming, in some degree, himself 
divine. Like a new soul, they renew the body. We 
become physically nimble and lightsome; we tread on 
air; life is no longer irksome, and we think it will 
never be so. No man fears age or misfortune or death 
in their serene company, for he is transported out of 
the district of change. Whilst we behold unveiled the 
nature of justice and truth, we learn the difference 
between the absolute and the conditional or relative. 

and attempted reforms in methods of taxation, which displeased 
the aristocracy and led to his dismissal. 

1. “These are they,” etc. An adaptation of “Proverbs” viii. 
23-30. 



IDEALISM 


G1 


e apprehend the absolute. As it were, for the first 
time, we exist. We become immortal, for we learn that 
time and space are relations of matter; that with a 
perception of truth or a virtuous will they have no 
affinity. 

5. Finally, religion and ethics, 1 which may be fitly 
called the practice of ideas, or the introduction of 
ideas into life, have an analogous effect with all lower 
culture, in degrading nature and suggesting its de¬ 
pendence on spirit. Ethics and religion differ herein; 
that the one is the system of human duties commenc¬ 
ing from man; the other, from God. Keligion includes 
the personality of God; ethics does not. They are one 
to our present design. They both put nature under 
foot. The first and last lesson of religion is, “ The 
things that are seen, are temporal; the things that 
are unseen, are eternal.” 2 It puts an affront upon na¬ 
ture. It does that for the unschooled, which philoso¬ 
phy does for Berkeley and Viasa. 3 The uniform lan¬ 
guage that may be heard in the churches of the most 
ignorant sects is,—“ Contemn the unsubstantial shows 
of the world; they are vanities, dreams, shadows, un¬ 
realities ; seek the realities of religion.” The dev¬ 
otee flouts nature. Some theosophists have arrived 
at a certain hostility and indignation towards matter, 


1. Ethics. The science that treats of the nature and grounds of 
moral obligation, and of the rules that ought to determine conduct 
in accordance with this obligation, especially with respect to the 
rights of others. 

2. “ The things that are seen,” etc. See “ 2 Corinthians ” iv. 18. 

3. Viasa. More generally, Vyasa. A Hindoo sage or saint, who 
is supposed to have been the original compiler of the Vedas, the 
sacred books of India. 



62 


NATURE 


as the Manichean 1 and Plotinus. 2 They distrusted in 
themselves any looking back to these flesh-pots of 
Egypt. 3 Plotinus was ashamed of his body. In short, 
they might all say of matter, what Michael Angelo said 
of external beauty, “ It is the frail and weary weed, 
in which God dresses the soul which he has called into 
time.” 

It appears that motion, poetry, physical and intel¬ 
lectual science, and religion, all tend to affect our con¬ 
victions of the reality of the external world. But I 
own there is something ungrateful in expanding too 
curiously the particulars of the general proposition, 
that all culture tends to imbue us with idealism. I 
have no hostility to nature, but a child’s love to it. 
I expand and live in the warm day like corn and 
melons. Let us speak her fair. I do not wish to 
fling stones at my beautiful mother, nor soil my gentle 
nest. I only wish to indicate the true position of na¬ 
ture in regard to man, wherein to establish man all 
right education tends; as the ground which to attain 
is the object of human life, that is, of man’s connec¬ 
tion with nature. Culture inverts the vulgar views 
of nature, and brings the mind to call that apparent 

1. Manichean. A follower of Mani, the traditional founder of 
Manicheism in Persia, the central doctrine of which is that there 
are two supreme principles : light, the source of all good, and dark¬ 
ness, the source of all evil. In the visible world both are mingled. 

2. Plotinus. A Neo-Platonic philosopher, born about 204 a. d. 
His works were entitled “Enneads.” When asked to have his 
portrait drawn, he replied: “Is it not enough to drag after us 
wheresoever we go that image in which nature has shut us up ? Do 
you think that we should likewise transmit to future ages an image 
of that image as a sight worthy of their admiration?” 

3. Flesh-pots of Egypt. This familiar allusion is from “Exodus” 
xvi. 3. 




IDEALISM 


63 


which it uses to call 1 real, and that real which it uses 
to call visionary. Children, it is true, believe in the 
external world. The belief that it appears only, is an 
afterthought, but with culture this faith will as surely 
arise on the mind as did the first. 

The advantage of the ideal theory over the popular 
faith is this, that it presents the world in precisely that 
view which is most desirable to the mind. It is, in 
fact, the view which reason, both speculative and practi¬ 
cal, that is, philosophy and virtue, take. For, seen in 
the light of thought, the world always is phenomenal; 
and virtue subordinates it to the mind. Idealism sees 
the world in God. It beholds the whole circle of per¬ 
sons and things, of actions and events, of country and 
religion, not as painfully accumulated, atom after 
atom, act after act, in an aged creeping past, but as 
one vast picture which God paints on the instant 
eternity for the contemplation of the soul. Therefore 
the soul holds itself off from a too trivial and micro¬ 
scopic study of the universal tablet. It respects the 
end too much to immerse itself in the means. It sees 
something more important in Christianity than the 
scandals of ecclesiastical history or the niceties of 
criticism; and, very incurious concerning persons or 
miracles, and not at all disturbed by chasms of his¬ 
torical evidence, it accepts from God the phenomenon, 
as it finds it, as the pure and awful form of religion 
in the world. It is not hot and passionate at the ap¬ 
pearance of what it calls its own good or bad fortune, 
at the union or opposition of other persons. No man 


1. Uses to call. Is accustomed to call. Hardly a warrantable 
use of this verb in the present tense. 




64 


NATURE 


is its enemy. It accepts whatsoever befalls, as part 
of its lesson. It is a watcher more than a doer, and 
it is a doer, only that it may the better watch. 

CHAPTER VII 

SPIRIT 

It is essential to a true theory of nature and of man, 
that it should contain somewhat progressive. Uses 
that are exhausted or that may be, and facts that end 
in the statement, cannot be all that is true of this 
brave lodging wherein man is harbored, and wherein 
all his faculties find appropriate and endless exercise. 
And all the uses of nature admit of being summed in 
one, which yields the activity of man an infinite scope. 
Through all its kingdoms, to the suburbs and outskirts 
of things, it is faithful to the cause whence it had its 
origin. It always speaks of spirit. It suggests the 
absolute. It is a perpetual effect. It is a great shadow 
pointing always to the sun behind us. 

The aspect of nature is devout. Like the figure of 
Jesus, she stands with bended head, and hands folded 
upon the breast. The happiest man is he who learns 
from nature the lesson of worship. 

Of that ineffable essence which we call spirit, he 
that thinks most, will say least. We can foresee God 
in the coarse, and, as it were, distant phenomena of 
matter; but when we try to define and describe himself, 
both language and thought desert us, and we are as 
helpless as fools and savages. That essence refuses to 
be recorded in propositions, but when man has wor¬ 
shiped him intellectually, the noblest ministry of na¬ 
ture is to stand as the apparition of God. It is the 


SPIRIT 


65 


organ through which the universal spirit speaks to the 
individual, and strives to lead back the individual to it. 

When we consider spirit, we see that the views al¬ 
ready presented do not include the whole circumfer¬ 
ence of man. We must add some related thoughts. 

Three problems are put by nature to the mind; 
What is matter? Whence is it? and Whereto? The 
first of these questions only, the ideal theory answers. 
Idealism saith: matter is a phenomenon, not a sub¬ 
stance. Idealism acquaints us with the total dispar¬ 
ity between the evidence of our own being and the 
evidence of the world’s being. The one is perfect; the 
other, incapable of any assurance; the mind is a part 
of the nature of things; the world is a divine dream, 
from which we may presently awake to the glories and 
certainties of day. Idealism is a hypothesis to ac¬ 
count for nature by other principles than those of 
carpentry and chemistry. Yet, if it only deny the 
existence of matter, it does not satisfy the demands 
of the spirit. It leaves God out of me. It leaves me 
in the splendid labyrinth of my perceptions, to wander 
without end. Then the heart resists it, because it 
balks the affections in denying substantive being to 
men and women. Nature is so pervaded with human 
life that there is something of humanity in all and 
in every particular. But this theory makes nature 
foreign to me, and does not account for that con¬ 
sanguinity which we acknowledge to it. 

Let it stand then, in the present state of our knowl¬ 
edge, merely as a useful introductory hypothesis, serv¬ 
ing to apprise us of the eternal distinction between 
the soul and the world. 

But when, following the invisible steps of thought, 


66 


NATURE 


we come to inquire, Whence is matter? and Whereto? 
many truths arise to us out of the recesses of con¬ 
sciousness. We learn that the highest is present to 
the soul of man; that the dread universal essence, 
which is not wisdom, or love, or beauty, or power, but 
all in one, and each entirely, is that for which all 
things exist, and that by which they are; that spirit 
creates; that behind nature, throughout nature, spirit 
is present; one and not compound it does not act upon 
us from without, that is, in space and time, but spirit¬ 
ually, or through ourselves: therefore, that spirit, that 
is, the Supreme Being, does not build up nature 
around us but puts it forth through us, as the life of 
the tree puts forth new branches and leaves through 
the pores of the old. As a plant upon the earth, so 
a man rests upon the bosom of God; he is nourished 
by unfailing fountains, and draws at his need inex¬ 
haustible power. Who can set bounds to the possibili¬ 
ties of man? Once inhale the upper air, being ad¬ 
mitted to behold the absolute natures of justice and 
truth, and we learn that man has access to the entire 
mind of the Creator, is himself the creator in the 
finite. This view, which admonishes me where the 
sources of wisdom and power lie, and points to virtue 
as to 

The golden key 

Which opes the palace of eternity,* 

carries upon its face the highest certificate of truth, 
because it animates me to create my own world 
through the purification of my soul. 

1. “ The golden key,” etc. Milton’s “ Comus,” 1.13. It should read: 

“That golden key 
That opes the palace of eternity.” 




PROSPECTS 


67 


The world proceeds from the same spirit as the body 
of man. It is a remoter and inferior incarnation of 
God, a projection of God in the unconscious. But it 
differs from the body in one important respect. It is 
not, like that, now subjected to the human will. Its 
serene order is inviolable by us. It is, therefore, to 
us, the present expositor of the divine mind. It is a 
fixed point whereby we may measure our departure. 
As we degenerate, the contrast between us and our 
house is more evident. We are as much strangers in 
nature as we are aliens from God. We do not under¬ 
stand the notes of birds. The fox and the deer run 
away from us; the bear and tiger rend us. We do not 
know the uses of more than a few plants, as corn and 
the apple, the potato and the vine. Is not the land¬ 
scape, every glimpse of which hath a grandeur, a face 
of Him? Yet this may show us what discord is be¬ 
tween man and nature, for you cannot freely admire 
a noble landscape if laborers are digging in the field 
hard by. The poet finds something ridiculous in his 
delight until he is out of the sight of men. 

CHAPTER VIII 

PROSPECTS 

In inquiries respecting the laws of the world and 
the frame of things, the highest reason is always the 
truest. That which seems faintly possible, it is so 
refined, is often faint and dim because it is deepest 
seated in the mind among the eternal verities. Em¬ 
pirical science is apt to cloud the sight, and by the 
very knowledge of functions and processes to bereave 
the student of the manly contemplation of the whole. 


68 


NATURE 


The savant becomes unpoetic. 1 But the best read nat¬ 
uralist who lends an entire and devout attention to 
truth, will see that there remains much to learn of his 
relation to the world, and that it is not to be learned 
by any addition or subtraction or other comparison 
of known quantites, but is arrived at by untaught 
sallies of the spirit, by a continual self-recovery, and 
by entire humility. He will perceive that there are 
far more excellent qualities in the student than pre¬ 
ciseness and infallibility; that a guess is often more 
fruitful than an indisputable affirmation, and that a 
dream may let us deeper into the secret of nature than 
a hundred concerted experiments. 

For the problems to be solved are precisely those 
which the physiologist and the naturalist omit to 
state. It is not so pertinent to man to know all the 
individuals of the animal kingdom, as it is to know 
whence and whereto is this tyrannizing unity in his 
constitution, which evermore separates and classifies 
things, endeavoring to reduce the most diverse to one 
form. When I behold a rich landscape, it is less to 
my purpose to recite correctly the order and super¬ 
position of the strata, 2 than to know why all thought 

1. The savant becomes unpoetic. Darwin says in his Autobiog¬ 
raphy : “ Now for many years I cannot endure to read a line of 
poetry. I have tried lately to read Shakespeare and found it so in¬ 
tolerably dull that it nauseated me. I have also almost lost my 
taste for pictures and music. . . My mind seems to have become a 
kind of machine for grinding general laws out of large collections 
of facts. But why this should have caused the atrophy of that 
part of the brain alone on which the higher tastes depend, I can¬ 
not conceive.” 

2. Superposition of strata. This is the language of geology—the 
order in which the strata or layers of the earth’s crust are laid upon 
each other. 



PROSPECTS 


69 


of multitude is lost in a tranquil sense of unity. I 
cannot greatly honor minuteness in details, so long 
as there is no hint to explain the relation between 
things and thoughts; no ray upon the metaphysics 1 of 
conchology, of botany, of the arts, to show the relation 
of the forms of flowers, shells, animals, architecture 
to the mind, and build science upon ideas. In a cabi¬ 
net of natural history, we become sensible of a certain 
occult recognition and sympathy in regard to the most 
unwieldy and eccentric forms of beast, fish, and in¬ 
sect. The American who has been confined, in his 
own country, to the sight of buildings designed after 
foreign models, is surprised on entering York Minster 2 
or St. Peter’s at Rome, by the feeling that these struc¬ 
tures are imitations also,—faint copies of an invisible 
archetype. Nor has science sufficient humanity, so 
long as the naturalist overlooks that wonderful con- 
gruity which subsists between man and the world; of 
which he is lord, not because he is the most subtile 
inhabitant, but because he is its head and heart, and 
finds something of himself in every great and small 
thing, in every mountain stratum, in every new law of 
color, fact of astronomy, or atmospheric influence 
which observation or analysis lay open. A perception 
of this mystery inspires the muse of George Herbert, 3 


1. Metaphysics. This is abstract or speculative philosophy, as 
opposed to concrete or scientific knowledge. It is defined as “the 
science of the inward and essential nature of things ”; also as 
“the science of the mind treated by means of introspection and 
analysis, and not by experiment and scientific observation.” 

2. York Minster. The grand cathedral at York, England. A 
cathedral church is called a minster (Latin monasterium .) when it 
originated in a monastery. 

3. George Herbert ( 1593 - 1633 ). An English poet, celebrated for 



70 


NATURE 


the beautiful psalmist of the seventeenth century. The 
following lines are part of his little poem on Man. 

Man is all symmetry, 

Full of proportions, one limb to another, 

And to all the world besides. 

Each part may call the farthest, brother ; 

For head with foot hath private amity, 

And both with moons and tides. 

Nothing hath got so far 
But man hath caught and kept it as his prey ; 

His eyes dismount the highest star : 

He is in little all the sphere. 

Herbs gladly cure our flesh, because that they 
Find their acquaintance there. 

For us, the winds do blow, 

The earth doth rest, heaven move, and fountains flow ; 
Nothing we see, but means our good, 

As our delight, or as our treasure ; 

The whole is either our cupboard of food, 

Or cabinet of pleasure. 

The stars have us to bed : 

Night draws the curtain ; which the sun withdraws. 
Music and light attend our head. 

All things unto our flesh are kind, 

In their descent and being ; to our mind, 

In their ascent and cause. 

More servants wait on man 
Than he’ll take notice of. In evei*y path, 

He treads down that which doth befriend him 
When sickness makes him pale and wan. 

Oh mighty love ! Man is one world, and hath 
Another to attend him. 

The perception of this class of truth makes the at¬ 
traction which draws men to science, but the end is 


his beautiful religious poems, originally published under the title : 
“ The Temple : Sacred Poems and Private Ejaculations.” 



PROSPECTS 


71 


lost sight of in attention to the means. In view of 
this half-sight of science, we accept the sentence of 
Plato, that “ poetry comes nearer to vital truth than 
history.” 1 Every surmise and vaticination of the mind 
is entitled to a certain respect, and we learn to prefer 
imperfect theories, and sentences which contain 
glimpses of truth, to digested systems which have no 
one valuable suggestion. A wise writer will feel that 
the ends of study and composition are best answered 
by announcing undiscovered regions of thought, and 
so communicating, through hope, new activity to the 
torpid spirit. 

I shall therefore conclude this essay with some tradi¬ 
tions of man and nature, which a certain poet sang to 
me; and which, as they have always been in the world, 
and perhaps reappear to every bard, may be both his¬ 
tory and prophecy. 

“ The foundations of man are not in matter, but in 
spirit. But the element of spirit is eternity. To it, 
therefore, the longest series of events, the oldest 
chronologies are young and recent. In the cycle of the 
universal man, from whom the known individuals pro¬ 
ceed, centuries are points, and all history is but the 
epoch of one degradation. 

“ We distrust and deny inwardly our sympathy with 
nature. We own and disown our relation to it, by 
turns. We are like Nebuchadnezzar, dethroned, bereft 


1. “ Poetry comes nearer to vital truth,” etc. Mrs. Browning, in 
“ Aurora Leigh,” calls the poets : 

‘ ‘ The only truth-tellers now left to God, 

The only speakers of essential truth 
Opposed to relative, comparative, 

And temporal truths.” 




NATURE 


n 

of reason, and eating grass like an ox. But who can 
set limits to the remedial force of spirit? 

“ A man is a god in ruins. When men are innocent, 
life shall be longer, and shall pass into the immortal 
as gently as we awake from dreams. Now, the world 
would be insane and rabid, if these disorganizations 
should last for hundreds of years. It is kept in check 
by death and infancy. Infancy is the perpetual Mes¬ 
siah, which comes into the arms of fallen men, and 
pleads with them to return to paradise. 

“ Man is the dwarf of himself. Once he was per¬ 
meated and dissolved by spirit. He filled nature with 
his overflowing currents. Out from him sprang the 
sun and moon; from man the sun, from woman the 
moon. The laws of his mind, the periods of his actions 
externized themselves into day and night, into the 
year and the seasons. But, having made for himself 
this huge shell, his waters retired; he no longer fills 
the veins and veinlets; he is shrunk to a drop. He 
sees that the structure still fits him, but fits him co- 
lossally. Say, rather, once it fitted him, now it cor¬ 
responds to him from far and on high. He adores 
timidly his own work. Now is man the follower of 
the sun, and woman the follower of the moon. Yet 
sometimes he starts in his slumber, and wonders at 
himself and his house, and muses strangely at the 
resemblance betwixt him and it. He perceives that 
if his law is still paramount, if still he have elemental 
power, if his word is sterling yet in nature, it is not 
conscious power, it is not inferior but superior to his 
will. It is instinct.” Thus my Orphic poet 1 sang. 


1. Orphic poet. Orpheus was a semi-mythical or legendary 
Greek poet, whose music was so charming as to give him power 




PROSPECTS 


73 


At present, man applies to nature but half his force. 
He works on the world with his understanding alone. 
He lives in it and masters it by a penny-wisdom; and 
he that works most in it is but a half-man, and whilst 
his arms are strong and his digestion good, his mind 
is imbruted, and he is a selfish savage. His relation 
to nature, his power over it, is through the understand¬ 
ing, as by manure; the economic use of fire, wind, 
water, and the mariner’s needle; steam, coal, chemical* 
agriculture; the repairs of the human body by the 
dentist and the surgeon. This is such a resumption 
of power as if a banished king should buy his terri¬ 
tories inch by inch, instead of vaulting at once into his 
throne. Meantime, in the thick darkness, there are 
not wanting gleams of a better light,—occasional ex¬ 
amples of the action of man upon nature with his 
entire force,—with reason as well as understanding. 
Such examples are, the traditions of miracles in the 
earliest antiquity of all nations; the history of Jesus 
Christ; the achievements of a principle, as in reli¬ 
gious and political revolutions, and in the abolition 
-of the slave-trade; the miracles of enthusiasm, as those 
reported of Swedenborg, Hohenlohe , * 1 and the Shakers ; 2 
many obscure and yet contested facts, now arranged 

over all things, animate and inanimate, in Nature. There is a sug¬ 
gestion in this legend of the true nature poet of modern times ; his 
loftiest inspiration comes from his intimate sympathy with nature. 
At the close of this essay, Emerson feels himself exalted by his 
noble theme to the attitude of an Orphic poet. 

1. Hohenlohe. Leopold Alexander, Prince of Hohenlohe-Wal- 
denburg-Schillingsfiirst (1794-1849), a German Roman Catholic 
ecclesiastic, who practiced a form of prayer-cure. 

2. Shakers. A religious sect, founded in Manchester, England, 
in the middle of the eighteenth century, popularly so named from 
the agitations or movements that form a part of their ceremonial. 



74 


NATURE 


under the name of Animal Magnetism ; 1 prayer; elo¬ 
quence; self-healing; and the wisdom of children. 
These are examples of reason’s momentary grasp of 
the scepter; the exertions of a power which exists not 
in time or space, but an instantaneous in-streaming 
causing power. The difference between the actual and 
the ideal force of man is happily figured by the school¬ 
men, in saying, that the knowledge of man is an even¬ 
ing knowledge, vespertina cognitio , but that of God 
is a morning knowledge, matutina cognitio. 

The problem of restoring to the world original and 
eternal beauty is solved by the redemption of the soul. 
The ruin or the blank that we see when we look at 
nature, is in our own eye. The axis of vision is not 
coincident with the axis of things, and so they appear 
not transparent but opaque. The reason why the 
world lacks unity, and lies broken and in heaps, is be¬ 
cause man is disunited with himself. He cannot be 
a naturalist until he satisfies all the demands of the 
spirit. Love is as much its demand as perception. 
Indeed, neither can be perfect without the other. In 
the uttermost meaning of the words, thought is de¬ 
vout, and devotion is thought. Deep calls unto deep . 2 
But in actual life, the marriage is not celebrated. 
There are innocent men who worship God after the 
tradition of their fathers, but their sense of duty has 
not yet extended to the use of all their faculties. And 
there are patient naturalists, but they freeze their sub- 


1. Animal Magnetism. This term was applied by Mesmer to the 
phenomena of mesmerism. Emerson would to-day, doubtless, have 
added here the term “ Christian Science.” 

2. Deep calls unto deep. “ Deep calleth unto deep at the noise 
of thy waterspouts.”—“ Psalms ” xlii. 17. 



PROSPECTS 


15 


ject under the wintry light of the understanding. Is 
not prayer also a study of truth,—a sally of the soul 
into the unfound infinite ? JSTo man ever prayed 
heartily without learning something. But when a 
faithful thinker, resolute to detach every object from 
personal relations and see it in the light of thought, 
shall, at the same time, kindle science with the fire 
of the holiest affections, then will God go forth anew 
into the creation. 

It will not need, when the mind is prepared for 
study, to search for objects. The invariable mark of 
wisdom is to see the miraculous in the common. What 
is a day? What is a year? What is summer? What 
is woman? What is a child? What is sleep? To our 
blindness, these things seem unaffecting. We make 
fables to hide the baldness of the fact and conform it, 
as we say, to the higher law of the mind. But when 
the fact is seen under the light of an idea, the gaudy 
fable fades and shrivels. We behold the real higher 
law. To the wise, therefore, a fact is true poetry, 
and the most beautiful of fables. These wonders are 
brought to our own door. You also are a man. Man 
and woman and their social life, poverty, labor, sleep, 
fear, fortune, are known to you. Learn that nope of 
these things is superficial, but that each phenomenon 
has its roots in the faculties and affections of the mind. 
Whilst the abstract question occupies your intellect, 
nature brings it in the concrete to be solved by your 
hands. It were a wise inquiry for the closet, to com¬ 
pare, point by point, especially at remarkable crises in 
life, our daily history with the rise and progress of 
ideas in the mind. 

So shall we come to look at the world with new eyes. 


76 


NATUKE 


It shall answer the endless inquiry of the intellect,— 
What is truth? and of the affections,—What is good? 
by yielding itself passive to the educated Will. Then 
shall come to pass what my poet said; “Nature is not 
fixed but fluid. Spirit alters, molds, makes it. The 
immobility or bruteness of nature is the absence of 
spirit; to pure spirit it is fluid, it is volatile, it is obedi¬ 
ent. Every spirit builds itself a house and beyond its 
house a world and beyond its world a heaven. Know 
then that the world exists for you. For you is the phe¬ 
nomenon perfect. What we are, that only can we see. 
All that Adam had, all that Csesar could, you have and 
can do. Adam called his house, heaven and earth; 
Csesar called his house, Rome; you perhaps call yours, 
a cobbler’s trade; a hundred acres of plowed land; or 
a scholar’s garret. Yet line for line and point for 
point your dominion is as great as theirs, though with¬ 
out fine names. Build therefore your own world. As 
fast as you conform your life to the pure idea in your 
mind, that will unfold its great proportions. A cor¬ 
respondent revolution in things will attend the influx 
of the spirit. So fast will disagreeable appearances, 
swine, spiders, snakes, pests, mad-houses, prisons, ene¬ 
mies, vanish; they are temporary and shall be no more 
seen. The sordor and filths of nature, the sun shall 
dry up and the wind exhale. As when the summer 
comes from the south the snow-banks melt and the 
face of the earth becomes green before it, so shall the 
advancing spirit create its ornaments along its path, 
and carry with it the beauty it visits and the song 
which enchants it; it shall draw beautiful faces, warm 
hearts, wise discourse, and heroic acts, around its way, 
until evil is no more seen. The kingdom of man over 


PROSPECTS 


77 


nature, which cometh not with observation,—a do¬ 
minion such as now is beyond his dream of God,—he 
shall enter without more wonder than the blind man 
feels who is gradually restored to perfect sight.” 


LofC 


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88 Lamb’s Essays of Elia. (Selected.) 

89 Cowper’s Task, Book II. 

90 Wordsworth’s Selected Poems. 

91 Tennyson's The Holy Grail* and Sir 

Galahad. 

92 Addison’s Cato. 

98 Irving's Westminster Abbey* and 
Christmas Sketches. 

94-95 Macaulay’s Earl of Chatham. 
Second Essay. 

96 Early English Ballads. 

97 Skelton, Wyatt* and Surrey. (Selected 

Poems.) 

98 Edwin Arnold. (Selected Poems.) 

99 Caxton and Daniel. (Selections.) 

100 Fuller and Hooker. (Selections.) 

101 Marlowe’s Jewof Malta. (Condensed.) 
102-103 Macaulay’s Essay 011 Milton. 
104-105 Macaulay’s Essay on Addison. 

106 Macaulay’sEssay on Boswell'sJohnson 

107 Mandeville’s Travels and Wycliffe's 

Bible. (Selections.) 

108-109 Macaulay’s Essay on Frederick 
the Great. 

110-111 Milton’s Samson Agonistes. 
112-113-114 Franklin's Autobiography. 
115-116 Herodotus's Stories of Croesus, 
Cyrus, and Babylon. 

117 Irving’s Alhambra. (Selected.) 

118 Burke’s Present Discontents. 

119 Burke’s Speech on Conciliation with 

American Colouies. 

120 Macaulay’s Essay on Byron. 

121-122 Motley’s Peter the Great. 

123 Emerson’s American Scholar. 

124 Arnold’s Sohrab and Bustum. 
125-126 Longfellow’s Evangeline. 

127 Andersen’s Danish Fairy Tales. 

(Selected.) 

128 Tennyson’s The Coming of Arthur, 

and The Passing of Arthur. 

129 Lowell’s The Vision of Sir Launfal, 

and other Poems. 

130 Whittier’s Songs of Labor, and other 

Poems. 

131 Words of Abraham Lincoln. 

182 Grimm’s German Fairy Tales. (Se 

lected.) 

138 JCsop’s Fables. (Selected.) 

134 Arabian Nights: Aladdin* or the 
Wonderful Lamp. 

185-86 The Psalter. 

187-38 Scott’s Ivanhoe. (Condensed.) 
189-40 Scott’s Kenilworth. (Condensed.) 
141-42 Scott’sTheTalisman. (Condensed.) 
143 Gods and Heroes of the North. 
144-45 Pope’s Iliad of Homer. (Selec¬ 
tions from Books I.-VIII.) 

1 4 * four Mediaeval Chroniclers. 

ante's Inferno. (Condensed.) 

9 The Book of Job. (Revised Version.) 

w-Wow and Mew-Mew. By Geor- 

giana M. Craik. 

he N urn berg Stove. By Louise de 

LA RamAe. 

ayne's Speech. To which Webster 
'Aolied. 

Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. 

(Condensed.) By Lewis Carroll. 


154-155 Defoe’s Journal of the Plagne. 

(Condensed.) 

166-157 More’s Utopia. (Condensed.) 
158-159 Lamb’s Essays. (Selections.) 
160-161 Burke’s Reflections on the 
French Revolution. 

162-163 Macaulay’s History of England* 
Chapter 1. 

164-165-166 Prescott’s Conquest of Mexi- 

co* (Condensed.) 

167 Longfellow’s Voices of the Night, 

and other Poems. 

168 Hawthorne’s Wonder Book. Selected 

169 De(^ulncey’s Flight of a Tartar 

170-171-172 George Eliot’s Silas Marner. 
173 Rnskin’s King of the Golden River, 
and Dame Wiggins of Lee and her 
Seven Wonderful Cats. 

174-176 Irving’s Tales of a Traveler. 

176 Ruskin’s Of King’s Treasuries. First 

half of Sesame and Li lies. 

177 Ruskin’s Of Queens' Gardens. Second 

half of Sesame and Lilies. 

178 Macaulay’s Life of Johnson. 
179-180 Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe. 
181-182-183 Wykes’sSliakespeareReader. 
184 Hawthorne’s Grandfather’s Chair. 

Part I. 

185-186 Southey’s Life of Nelson. Con¬ 
densed. 

187 Curtis’s The Public Duty of Educated 
Men. 

188-189 Hawthorne's Twice-Told Tales. 

(Selected ) 

190-191 Chesterfield’s Letters to HisSon. 

192 English and Ameiican Sonnets. 

193 Emerson’s Self-Reliance. 

194 Emerson’s Compensation. 

195-196 Tennyson’s The Princess. 
197-198 Pope’s Homer’s Iliad. Books I.* 

VI., XXII., and XXIV. 

199 Plato’s Crito. 

200 A Dog of Flanders. By Louise de 

la RamAe. 

201-202 Dryden’s Pal am on and Arcite. 

203 Hawthorne’s Snow-Image, The Great 

Stone Face, Little Daffydowndilly. 

204 Poe’s Gold Bug. 

205 Holmes’s Poems. Selected. 

206-207 Kingsley’s Water-Babies. 

208 Thomas Hood’s Poems. Selected. 

209 Tennyson's Palace of Art, and other 

Poems. 

210 Browning’s Saul, and other Poems. 

211 Matthew Arnold’s Poems. Selected. 
212-213 Scott’s Lay of the Last Minstrel. 

214 Paul’s Trip with the Moon. By E 

W* Weaver 

215 Craik’s Little Lame Prince. 

216 Speeches of Lincoln and Douglas in 

1868. 

217 Hawthorne’s Two Tanglewood Tales. 

(Selected.) 

218-219 Longfellow's Hlanttha, 


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10 Heroes of the Revolution. James 

Parton. 


MAYNARD, MERRILL, & CO., Publishers, 

». **. *■ n em* m* •*».*, t*»w y*.-k. 


LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 



0 015 785 870 1 # 





















































